


Indiana Barnes and the Curse of the Tesseract

by follow_the_sun, SulaSafeRoom



Series: The Adventures of Indiana Barnes [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Brief torture scene, Canon Disabled Character, Inspired by Indiana Jones, Inspired by The Rocketeer, M/M, Marvel Norse Lore, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Stucky Big Bang 2017, The Real Treasure Was the Priceless Historical Sites We Blew Up Along The Way, sbb2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-08 08:36:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 56,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11642877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SulaSafeRoom/pseuds/SulaSafeRoom
Summary: It's 1943, and art history professor Steve Rogers has been hired to help wealthy industrialist Tony Stark find his father, who went missing while searching for the fabled Tesseract. It sounds like an easy job until Steve finds out that his old flame, Bucky Barnes, is also part of the expedition.





	1. Steve

**Author's Note:**

> [Click here for fabulous art](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11873487) by the amazing [SulaSafeRoom](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sulasaferoom)! Go look at it RIGHT NOW!

When his name is called at the Army recruiting office, Steve Rogers stands up from his chair and walks to the front desk with his heart in his throat. It’s his fourth attempt at enlisting, and each time, he’s gone to a different borough of New York City to minimize his chances of getting caught. He’s running out of options and he knows it, but he’ll keep trying. One of these times it has to work. It _has_ to.

“Rogers,” the doctor behind the table says, and looks up at him, and Steve reads the answer in his eyes even before they finish sizing him up. “What’d your father die of?”

“Mustard gas,” says Steve, head high, shoulders back. He’s got exactly one chance to change this guy’s mind; if he can’t, then at least he’s going to make this rejection as hard on the Army as it is on him. “He was in the 107th Infantry. I was hoping I could be—”

“Says here you’re a teacher?”

“A professor,” says Steve. “St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn. _Esse non videri.”_ When the doctor gives him a blank look, he says, “‘To be, not to seem.’ It’s the school motto.”

“I know what it means, son.” The doctor frowns at him. “We’re not supposed to take men out of critical jobs on the homefront. I’d say teaching qualifies.”

“I teach art history at a women’s college,” Steve says. He hates himself for dismissing the girls like that—they deserve their education as much as anybody—but if the Allies lose the war, it won’t matter whether they can tell Monet from Picasso. Word on the Nazis is, any art they don’t steal, they burn. “I’m not sure that’s _critical,_ not when there’s a war on.”

The doctor finally meets his eyes, and Steve knows he was right about the look, and the business about his job was just to soften the blow. “I’m sorry, son,” he says. “You’d be ineligible on your asthma alone.”

“But—” Steve leans forward as the doctor picks up the **4F** stamp. “Isn’t there anything you can do?”

“I’m doing it,” the doctor says, as the stamp comes down. “I’m saving your life.” He thrusts the form into Steve’s hand and turns back to his clipboard, already looking toward the next man who might be a soldier.

Steve has spent a lot of time in recruiting offices these last few weeks, and he’s seen men openly weep when they’re told they’re unfit for service. Hell, the first time he was rejected, he came close himself. This time, he feels nothing but grim resignation. He’s been rejected in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, and now Manhattan. Well, who knows; maybe Queens will change his luck. He has a little money he was saving up for a good meal and a drink to celebrate if he enlisted today; maybe he should spend it on subway fare and a ticket to this Expo everyone’s talking about. If the midway is open all night, then the recruiting offices will be, too. Maybe today could still be the day that changes everyth—

Steve snaps back to attention when he nearly walks into a man who’s blocking his path on the sidewalk. The man is dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a neat Van Dyke beard and an almost garishly expensive suit, and he’s clearly not accustomed to being overlooked. “Professor Rogers,” he says, and Steve takes a step back, startled. “You’re a hard man to find. Tried to sit in on your lecture this morning, they said you were out sick. Went around to your apartment, and lo and behold, you were miraculously healed. Hell of a rat trap, by the way. I know a junior professor’s salary isn’t much, but you might want to look for a place with glass instead of boards in the windows next time. Just a thought.”

“Who are you?” Steve demands.

The stranger breaks into a delighted grin. “You don’t recognize me!”

“Wouldn’t have asked if I did,” Steve says, annoyed. It’s unsettling that this man knows him, but he’s too slender and well-dressed to be one of Fisk’s thugs. Truth be told, Steve almost wishes he was; the mood he’s in right now, he feels like taking a beating might almost be worth it if it gave him an excuse to throw a few punches of his own.

“Well, then, let me enlighten you, my young friend.” The man lays a hand on Steve’s shoulder, and it’s all Steve can do not to pull away. He contents himself with glaring, but the stranger ignores it. “My name is Tony Stark, and I’m about to change your life. Tell me, how would you like to go down in history as the man who found the Tesseract?”

Steve stares at him.

 _Tony Stark._ He knows who that is, of course; not knowing the name Stark would be like not knowing Carnegie or Frick or Rockefeller. And now that he has a name to connect to the face, this man does look a lot like the one whose photo is always making the society pages, usually when he’s stepping out of his custom-built Bugatti Aérolithe and sweeping into a theater with some bombshell blonde on his arm. But the idea that a Stark would be here, talking to _him,_ is so ludicrous that it takes a moment for the actual question to sink in. “Mr. Stark—”

“Call me Tony. Mr. Stark’s my father, and God knows the old bastard causes me enough trouble.”

“Mr. Stark,” Steve says firmly, “the Tesseract is as much of a myth as Atlantis or the Holy Grail, and I don’t appreciate you mocking my work.” He starts walking, quickly, but Tony falls into step beside him, and Steve finds himself bitterly despising the fate that not only gave him asthma but gave Tony long enough legs that he doesn’t even have to hustle to keep up.

“Rogers, buddy, you’ve got me all wrong. I’m serious as a heart attack. Okay, it’s true that I’m not interested in finding a mystical glowing blue cube infused with the power of the Norse gods. But my father is, and I’m interested in finding my father.”

Steve pauses. “Howard Stark is missing?” he says, and then, because he’s still spoiling for a fight, “Did you check the cathouses?”

Tony raises an eyebrow. “So you do read the papers,” he says. “Dad likes to say he’s a man of many passions. It happens of those passions is the Tesseract. He’s been interested in it since he was a kid, but lately it’s turned into a full-fledged obsession. Six months ago, he told his business partner, Obadiah Stane, that he’d found some clue to its whereabouts and he was going on hiatus to check it out. According to Obie, nobody’s heard from him since.”

“Your father’s been gone for six months and you didn’t notice?” Steve says, and apparently that’s what he should’ve led with if he wanted a fight, because Tony’s eyes go cold.

“Dad and I aren’t what you’d call close,” he says, the words clipped. “But now that the old bastard’s overdue, it’s up to me to track him down—or else, God forbid, take the reins of the company myself. Do you have any idea how much running a business would cut into my social life? That’s where you come in. A week ago, I got a package in the mail. It was Dad’s journal: all his notes on his hunt for the Tesseract. He must’ve known he was headed for trouble and mailed it to me for safekeeping. Now, I can’t make heads or tails of this book, which is frankly unsettling, given that I’m _very_ smart. Know what smart people do when they get stuck? They bring in another pair of eyes. From what I can make out, Dad thinks there are clues to the Tesseract’s location hidden in pieces of ancient art around the world. Now, I don’t know a damn thing about art or history, but my assistant does, and she tells me you’re the man I need on this.”

“Whatever your father thinks this clue is, it won’t get him anywhere,” Steve says flatly. “He’s not the first treasure hunter who’s thought he had a line on the Tesseract, or the fortieth. Whatever he’s got, I guarantee it’s a lie, a forgery, or just outright wrong.”

“And I don’t give a good goddamn if it is,” says Tony. “I told you, my agenda isn’t to find the cube; it’s to find my father. All I need from you is three months of your time. I spoke to your Dean of College; he says he can spare you for the summer term—seemed to think getting out of the classroom would do you some good, actually.”

“Not interested,” Steve says. He picks up his pace some more, but Tony is still matching him step for step.

“There’s a generous salary in it for you, plus travel expenses. You ever been to Norway? Absolutely _packed_ with gorgeous blondes. They might be a little tall for you, but you seem like an enterprising guy, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Unless there’s already a special lady in your life, of course.”

“No,” Steve says shortly.

“Special fella, then? Not that I’m judging, it’s just that you artistic types have a reputation.”

Steve turns around, fists clenched. “You want to stop talking now,” he says.

“Whoa,” Tony says, raising a hand and taking a step back, with a smirk that Steve really wants to punch off his goateed face. “All right, Slugger, your business is your business. But tell me, do you think the Kingpin’s going to wait for the rest of his money forever?”

Steve feels the color bleed out of his cheeks. “How do you know that name?”

“We have a convention,” Tony says. “All us wealthy scoundrels get together to make deals and drink the blood of the righteous working class. Simmer down, Rogers. I know because I give certain people a lot of money to keep an ear to the ground for me. Is that why you’re on your fourth enlistment attempt? Figure you can convince Fisk that it’s his patriotic duty not to rough up one of Uncle Sam’s finest, or just hoping they’ll ship you out before his goons catch up to you?”

Steve lowers his fists. “I want to enlist,” he says, very quietly, “because I don’t like bullies. I don’t care whether they come from Munich or Riverside Drive. And I want to enlist because there are men laying down their lives in this war, and I got no right to do any less.”

Tony raises an eyebrow. “And Uncle Sam agrees with you, does he?” When Steve doesn’t answer, he says, “You want to throw your life away, pal? Makes no difference to me. But if you help me find my father, and if you survive—because you might not, I usually wait a while to mention that, but now I wonder if a little mortal danger won’t sweeten the pot for you—then I’ll not only settle your debt with Fisk, I’ll also put in a word with a buddy of mine on the draft board. Do I have your attention?”

Steve is quiet for several seconds. Then he says, “I want to look at the journal first. There’s no point going any further until I know I can help you.”

“Deal,” says Tony, holding out his hand. Steve doesn’t shake it, and after a moment, Tony lowers it. “You _are_ prickly. I’ll have my girl Friday bring a copy to your apartment within the hour.”

“Fine.” Steve shoves his hands in his pockets and turns away. As he walks toward the nearest subway entrance, he makes sure he doesn’t look back. He doesn’t intend to give Tony Stark the satisfaction of making this any easier than he has to.

But he already knows he’s going to take the job.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, reader, and welcome to my first Big Bang fic! I've tried for a reasonable level of research and accuracy here, but in the style of my inspiration, the Indiana Jones movies, I've also played fast and loose with history, science, geography, and good sense wherever I felt like it.
> 
> Awesome beta readers are awesome:  
> [RobynGoodfellow](http://archiveofourown.org/users/robyngoodfellow/) \-- your plot assistance was invaluable. IOU one giant catfish of doom.  
> [Wrenlet](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Wrenlet/) \-- thanks for being the person who I can ask to beta my porn and still look in the eye later.  
> [Beradan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/beradan) \-- Sorry-not-sorry I blew so much stuff up.


	2. Bucky

Steve gets out of a Red Star taxi at the Brooklyn Navy Yard with all of his worldly possessions packed up in the steamer trunk his mother brought with her from Belfast. Funny to think that after all these years of only moving once—from the boarding house where Sarah O’Connell met Joseph Rogers to the rear tenement where Steve was born and raised—that old trunk is about to make its second voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s been a week since he met Tony Stark, and in that time, Steve’s life has changed completely. He’s barely slept since that first night, when he opened the door and found Virginia Potts on his doorstep. “Ginny?” he said, astounded, and she just smiled.

“I go by Pepper now. When Tony gives you a nickname, it tends to stick.”

“Pepper,” he repeated. “And you work for him?”

He couldn’t keep the dismay out of his voice, but Ginny—Pepper—ignored it. She was always good at keeping her feelings under wraps. They’d grown up in the same neighborhood, two Irish Catholic kids born days apart, and their mothers had tried to pair the two of them off as if God Himself had ordained it. At Sarah Rogers’ persistent urging, Steve had made a few awkward advances, but he was secretly relieved when Ginny didn’t reciprocate; it was clear to him that she was destined for bigger things than making babies with skinny Steve from down the street. “He’s not as bad as the papers make him out to be,” she said. “And the money is good.”

Steve opened his mouth, then shut it again, realizing that this was hardly a time to try to claim the moral high ground. “So you’re the one who recommended me to Stark?” he said instead. “Why?”

“Because if anything in Howard’s journal turns out to be true, then you’re the best man for the job,” she said simply, handing him a flat package wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine. She started to leave, then turned back. “Steve, I heard about your mother. I’m so sorry.”

Somehow or other, Steve managed to smile. Pepper wasn’t the only one who knew how to keep her feelings bottled up tight. “So am I,” he said.

Now, standing at the edge of the Navy Yard, he grabs the handle of the steamer trunk and starts lugging it down the walkway that leads to the private docks. Before he manages to move it more than a few feet, though, Tony appears out of nowhere and slings an arm around his shoulders. “Hold up there, buddy,” he says. “No need to hurt yourself. Just leave it till the rest of your bags show up, and my crew can haul everything at once.”

“This is everything,” Steve says. “In fact, I kind of thought I’d get here and you’d tell me to throw half the books overboard.”

“Books?” Tony gives him a look somewhere between disbelief and hilarity. “I told you to expense anything you needed, and all you brought is _books?”_

“Not _all,”_ Steve says, feeling his face get hot. At Ginny’s—Pepper’s—insistence, he also bought a new suit of everyday clothes and a set of sturdy work clothes, complete with boots, which effectively doubled his wardrobe. And then Pepper, apparently unsatisfied with what she saw on the invoice, sent him _more_ new clothes and a rucksack full of gear, including a long-bladed knife in a belt sheath and a pistol he doesn’t know how to load. Tony must not be kidding about the danger. “It’s like I told you, the journal doesn’t just lead to one location. It’s a list of clues, and we have to go to each one to find the key to the next—”

“—And we don’t know how many clues the old goat got through before he went missing, I know. I do listen occasionally, my friend. All right, let’s get my men down here. Follow me.” Tony is whistling as he walks, and Steve has to hurry to keep up as they head toward the dock.

Steve doesn’t know a thing about boats, and the only reason he knows this is a yacht is because Tony said so, but he doesn’t need to be a sailor to see that this is a gorgeous vessel. He expected something ostentatious, but Tony has let the craftsmanship speak for itself, and the care that went into this boat is obvious in the polished wood, the sleek Art Deco lines, the pristine sails and neatly coiled ropes. Tony catches him staring and grins. “The _Avenger,”_ he says. “Not too shabby, is she?”

Steve was just thinking that he never dreamed a boat could be so beautiful, but pretending to be blasé is the order of the day around Tony, so he just says, “I’m surprised you didn’t name it after a woman.”

Tony laughs. “My friend, if I went that route, I’d go broke having her repainted. Hey! Midwest! Get over here and pull your weight, you lazy bastards,” he calls toward a couple of dockworkers who are sitting on crates near the water.

“Midwest?” Steve asks, while one of the guys stands up, nudging the other. The one who’s still sitting has short blonde hair and a nose that’s been broken more than once. The other one is even more unkempt—Steve can see locks of dark hair brushing his collar under a battered brown hat—and there’s something funny about the way he moves: he seems heavier on his left side, and his left hand is shoved in the pocket of his leather aviator jacket. That guy is smiling when he turns around, opening his mouth, presumably to return the insult in kind—and then he sees Steve, and the smile slides right off his face.

“Yeah, that’s what I call this pair of reprobates,” Tony continues, oblivious to the fact that Steve and the dockworker are staring at each other in openmouthed shock. “Barton grew up in Iowa, and Barnes is from Indiana. I’ll expect you to bring yourself up to speed from here on out, Rogers, it’s not funny if I have to explain the jokes.” He finally notices that something has changed, and says, “Guys? Gentlemen? Give me a hint what’s happening here, there’s a lot of very intense staring and I’m not sure whether this is the prelude to a kiss or a gunfight.”

“Steve?” says the dockworker.

“Bucky?” Steve says.

“Who the hell is Bucky?” Tony asks, and then he breaks out the grin again. “James,” he says, like it’s Christmas morning, “do you two know each other? And how did you not tell me you had another embarrassing nickname before Indiana?”

Steve isn’t sure Bucky hears a word Stark says. He’s as still as a statue, eyes locked on Steve’s face, mouth open in astonishment. To be fair, Steve is staring too. It was a surprise to see Ginny, but not a shock; at least he knew she was in New York. But it’s been nine years since he’s seen Bucky Barnes, and in that time, his childhood friend has turned into a completely different person. Where he used to be neat and almost obsessively well-groomed, Bucky is weeks overdue for a haircut and days overdue for a shave, and he looks like he’s been living in the same rumpled clothes for God knows how long. Then he takes his left hand out of his pocket, and Steve gets another shock, because Bucky’s arm… well. At first he thinks it’s some kind of elaborate metal glove, but then the plates shift, leaving enough of a gap before they snap shut again for Steve to see that there’s _machinery_ underneath instead of flesh. Steve knows plenty of men lost limbs in the war, but he never dreamed anything like that existed to replace them.

Apparently oblivious to the minor miracle under his shirtsleeve, Bucky turns to Tony, points his mechanical index finger at Steve, and says, grimly, “He can’t be here.”

“The hell I can’t,” Steve’s mouth says, apparently without any connection to his brain. He can’t stop staring at Bucky’s face, so familiar and so different all at once. “Bucky… what happened to you?”

He means _back then,_ obviously; he means _why did you fall off the face of the earth nine years ago,_ he means _why didn’t you answer my letters,_ he means _I didn’t know if you were dead or if you just hated me, and I didn’t know which of those would’ve hurt worse._ But Bucky takes it differently and glowers back at him from under the brim of his ridiculous hat, as if the two of them weren’t inseparable for the best six years of Steve’s life.

“I joined the Army,” he says, and stomps onto the boat without looking back.

 

Barton’s first name turns out to be Clint, although he answers to Iowa—if you make sure he’s looking at you when you say it. “Lost my hearing in the war,” he explains, while he’s hauling Steve’s trunk up the gangplank. “Barnes was my sergeant. A good one. Then we went up against a German artillery unit that shelled us for a day and a half. I came back to base with both my eardrums blown out, and Barnes, well, you saw what happened to Barnes.”

Steve is dying to ask for more details about Bucky’s arm, but he knows Bucky won’t appreciate that if it gets back to him. Bucky never would let anybody see him bleed—metaphorically speaking, anyway; Steve has seen him literally bleed plenty of times, usually in defense of Steve. “So how’d the two of you wind up working for Stark?” he asks.

“We were in a special unit that worked with Howard Stark on some of his experimental weapons,” Clint says. “We both got invalided out right around the time Tony got mixed up in that bad business in Austria, and after they sent him home, Howard convinced him to hire us. Technically, Tony pays us to do the heavy lifting and handle whatever odd jobs he throws at us, but for a long time, Howard was slipping both of us a little extra to watch his back.”

“Austria,” Steve repeats. “I heard something about that. Tony took a prototype plane out and went missing in action, right?”

“Wounded in action,” Clint corrects, and when Steve can’t hide his skepticism, he says, “Believe it, Rogers. You’re probably thinking he’s just another spoiled Park Avenue kid whose daddy bought him a ticket out of the Big One the first time he stubbed his toe, but Tony’s as much of a legitimate 4F as Barnes and me. When he said he was hiring a professor the Army wouldn’t take because of his heart condition, I knew you were gonna fit right in.”

Steve raises an eyebrow. Sure, Tony has undoubtedly seen his file from the draft board, which probably mentions the harmless heart murmur he’s had for his whole life, but _too short, underweight,_ and _asthmatic_ are all much more obvious defects to focus on. Before he can try to pry any more details out of Clint, though, he sees something that drives the thought out of his mind completely.

A woman is stepping out of a black Buick that’s parked at the edge of the dock, in defiance of all the signs warning unauthorized vehicles to stay on the street. She’s wearing a sharp blue suit and a bright red hat over hair done up in victory curls, but it’s the way she walks up the gangplank that gets Steve’s attention: she moves like she’s used to giving orders and having them followed. “Gentlemen,” she says without preamble, in a strongly British-inflected voice, “I’m Agent Carter. I supervise all operations for the SSR’s New York branch, and I’ll be joining your expedition.”

Tony raises an eyebrow. “Oh, you will, will you?” he says, and frankly, Steve has to admire how he manages to put such a perfect balance of anger, skepticism, and lust into the question.

“The SSR has a vested interest in Howard Stark’s whereabouts and personal safety,” Carter says crisply. “If he should fall into enemy hands, he puts the entire Allied defense at risk. So, yes, Mr. Stark, assuming Stark Industries wants to retain its government contracts, I think it’s in your best interests to accept the SSR’s assistance.”

“Well, that is a convincing argument.” Tony hops up from where he’s been leaning against the rail and holds out a hand to help her onto the boat. She ignores it and walks past him, the heels of her shoes clicking on the wood.

Steve blinks, realizing he’s been staring, but that’s okay, because everyone else is staring too. It figures that Bucky is the first to recover his poise. “Hey, sugar,” he calls after her, standing up a little straighter, “what’s your first name?”

“Agent,” Carter says, as she swings one perfectly shaped leg over the ladder that will take her belowdecks. “My luggage is on the dock, Mr. Barnes. Be a dear and bring it to my cabin. I’ll be taking the large one.”

“What’s the SSR?” Steve asks, while Bucky blinks as if he’s not sure what just hit him, then shakes it off and heads down the gangplank.

“Strategic Scientific Reserve,” Clint replies. “Heard a little about them in the War, too. They do the stuff Allied Command can’t or won’t do. Experimental weapons, high-risk intel gathering, espionage. I’d say this trip of ours just got a whole lot more interesting.”

Steve shakes his head. The trip got too interesting for him right around the time he locked eyes with Bucky Barnes. He tries to tear his eyes away from Bucky, but it’s a losing battle. Bucky has his back to the boat as if Steve’s very existence offends him, so there’s no reason for Steve _not_ to watch his muscles ripple as he hoists one of Carter’s bags onto his shoulder.

Steve should leave. He knows he should. He should walk up to Tony right now and throw his money back in his face; he should get off this boat and never look back. But he won’t, and Bucky won’t either. He and Bucky were the only two people who could ever out-stubborn each other in the old days. He knows better than to expect Bucky to do the decent thing and bow out of this expedition, and goddammit, he’s not about to let Bucky see him run.

“Out of all the gin joints in all the world,” he mutters, but nobody hears him, and if Clint reads Steve’s lips, he decides to keep his own mouth shut.


	3. Peggy

“So I know I’m just be a dumb carnie from the ass end of Nowhere, U.S.A.,” Clint says, “but seeing as Tony promised me a pack of beautiful Scandinavian women, explain to me again why we’re on our way to—say the name of the place again?”

“I-re-land,” Steve says slowly, and when Clint makes a face at him, he grins and says, “Annagassan,” spelling it out with his fingers as he does. The ship was barely away from shore before he realized he needed to learn how to sign. When he approached Clint about lessons, he told him, truthfully, that he lost a lot of his hearing on one side to a lingering childhood ear infection, which means he’s one good punch to the head away from being as deaf as Clint—and Steve does get punched a lot. But really, he wants to learn because every time he looks at Bucky, it seems like Bucky is bending his metal hand into stiff, angry-looking gestures to tell Clint _something,_ and the way his eyes kept darting toward Steve makes it pretty clear that he’s the topic of discussion. Learning to sign might be the only way he gets to know what Bucky’s thinking, because God knows he’s keeping his distance—and so far, Steve can’t decide whether to feel infuriated or relieved about that.

“Annagassan,” Clint repeats, making sure he’s got the emphasis right. Steve nods; he can tell Clint is feeling self-conscious about not being able to check the inflection of his own voice. “So what’s that, a castle or something?”

“It’s a village on the Irish Sea. Vikings started raiding up and down the coast of Ireland about eleven hundred years ago. There’s a story that some warriors got stranded and stayed there, intermarried with the locals. That’s nothing unusual—my ma used to say she and I got our blonde hair from our Viking ancestors—but the story gets weirder from there. One of those Vikings supposedly lived for hundreds of years, and there’s a lot of art from the area that features him—carvings and tapestries and so on—holding a gold scepter with a blue stone. Apparently Howard thinks the scepter is a clue to the location of the Tesseract.”

“And no offense to you, I’m glad to have you along, but why did Tony need your help figuring this out?”

“Well,” Steve says, “first off, most of the primary sources for the legend are written in Irish. Howard was working from translations—bad ones. If we find the clue he talks about, it’s likely to be in Irish, too.”

“You speak Irish?”

“Yeah, my ma spoke it at home a lot.” Steve resented that when he was a kid, but now he’s grateful for it. Ginny’s mother refused to teach her, wanting her family to act like “real Americans,” but Sarah Rogers figured it was bad enough the English were trying to stamp out the Irish language in Ireland and she was damned if she was giving in once she was an ocean away. It’s a good thing, too: at the very end of her life, most of her English slipped away from her, but she still lit up when he spoke to her in her birth tongue. “I know enough to get by.”

Clint grins and slaps him on the back. “I hate to break it to you, buddy, but that might be half the reason. The other half is that Tony likes picking up strays.”

“Really?” Steve says. “Because I can’t get a read on the guy. One minute he’s in love with the sound of his own voice, the next it seems like he can’t even stand to be up here on deck with us.”

“Yeah, well,” Clint says, “Tony gets in moods sometimes. It’s not so bad if he gets his teeth into a project; that usually gets him out of his own head pretty fast. Other times, Bucky and I gotta make sure he doesn’t take a dive into a bottle.”

Steve frowns. There were a lot of families in his old neighborhood who used to call his ma when they were either too broke or too embarrassed to call a doctor, which means he got to watch more than his fair share of drunks coming to bad ends in the alleys and tenements of Red Hook. “What happens when he does?”

“Nothing good. That’s usually about when Barnes accidentally-on-purpose breaks something on that fancy mechanical arm of his. Gives him an excuse to drag Tony into his workshop and put a wrench in his hands. So far, that’s always been enough to snap him out of it. But most of the time, we just wait it out.” He looks up. “Can’t say I’m too upset with him at the moment, seeing as we’re about to get some better company.”

Steve looks up. Carter is walking toward them, hips swaying in time with the pitch of the ship. When she sees both of them watching, her red lips turn up in a faint smirk. “Honestly, it’s like you boys have never seen a woman before,” she says, taking a seat beside Steve on a cargo crate.

Steve wonders if she realizes how high her skirt hikes up when she sits like that. He feels himself blushing and wonders briefly if he can pass it off as sunburn from spending too much time on the deck of the yacht. “I was just…” he begins, and is surprised when Clint comes to his rescue.

“Steve and I were talking about how impressive it is that you can keep your balance on deck in those shoes,” he says, nodding toward her red kitten heels. “Settle a bet for us, would you? Steve figures you must have some dance training—not dance-hall dancing, but something classic, like ballet. Me, I would’ve said acrobatics, but I’m biased toward the circus.”

Carter looks surprised, and then her smile widens into something slightly more real. “Well, neither of you is entirely wrong,” she says. “Not that I have anything against dance halls, assuming I can find the right partner.”

Steve is trying to think of a response that won’t make him sound like a complete idiot when the ship rocks just a little more than usual. The cargo crate shifts, Carter’s thigh brushes his, and everything else goes straight out of his head. Clint chooses that moment to stand up and stretch. “Water’s getting a little rough,” he says, “I’m going to see if Barnes needs a break,” and once Carter looks away, he makes a gesture that needs no interpretation—it’s pretty much universal male code for _what’s wrong with you, idiot? Talk to the pretty lady—_ before he saunters off to the front of the boat.

Steve would dearly love to follow that advice, but so far, his conversations with women other than Pepper and the girls he teaches have pretty much consisted of his saying “um” a lot. “So, um,” he begins, then grimaces at himself and falls silent.

“Yes?”

“Well, I…” What would Tony do, if it was him Carter was talking to? What would _Bucky_ do? “I guess I’m just wondering why a beautiful dame would want to work for the SSR when she could be doing anything she wants,” he blurts.

Several reactions play across her face, and he has just enough time to hope that none of them is disgust before she suddenly smiles. “You really don’t know anything about women, do you?”

“This is probably the longest conversation I’ve had with one who wasn’t my ma or Pepper,” Steve says, and it looks like self-deprecation is the way to go, because it gets an honest-to-God laugh out of her. He wasn’t sure until now that she _did_ that. “But really, why? I mean, riding around on a millionaire’s yacht isn’t so bad, but I imagine it’s not like this all the time.”

“It usually involves a little more inconvenience,” she agrees. “But—do you want to serve your country, Steven?”

“Just Steve is fine,” says Steve. “And yeah, of course I do.” He should probably stop there, but he adds, “It’s not some abstract thing for me, you know. My parents were both immigrants, and neither of them thought the streets in America would really be paved with gold. They knew it was gonna be hard, and they still jumped at the chance to change their lives. My ma didn’t even get to finish grade school, and all she wanted before she died was to see me get an education. All the work she put in, the sacrifices she made so I could have better chances than she did—well, that’s what America is, right there. Knowing that life’s gonna keep punching you and yeah, sometimes you’re gonna fall down and stay down, but believing that even if you can’t crawl out of the ditch yourself, your kids don’t have to be stuck in the same mess as you were. That’s why I love my country. That’s why…”

“Why you want to go to war for it,” Carter says. She sounds a little surprised, and a lot thoughtful. “If you really want to know, I suppose I feel that I owe my country something as well. Besides, I’m good at what I do. A lot of men see a woman when they should see a weapon, and I know how to use that to my advantage.”

“Well,” Steve says, “I’ll do my best not to give you a reason to school me on that, Agent Carter.”

“Peggy,” she says. “Call me Peggy.” Then she glances toward the front of the ship, where heavy footsteps are approaching—not Clint’s, this time. “Mr. Barnes,” she says, “aren’t you meant to be steering the ship?”

“Handed it off to Clint,” Bucky says curtly. “Give us a minute?”

His tone makes it a polite request, but his cold blue eyes say otherwise, and Peggy visibly decides not to waste the energy fighting him. “Of course,” she says. “After all, you two are old friends. I’m sure you’ve been longing to catch up.” She swings her legs over the edge of the crate and stands, in one effortless movement. Bucky scowls after her as she walks away, and then he sits down, heavily, in the spot she vacated.

“Buck,” Steve says, trying to keep his tone neutral.

“Steve,” Bucky says, in the same tone. Then: “Why are you here?”

Steve takes a deep breath. When Bucky finally confronted him—and he knew Bucky would, eventually; he’s no good at letting things go—he expected anger. God knows Bucky has been snapping at anybody stupid enough to get within range—hell, Steve wouldn’t be surprised if his vile mood is half the reason Tony’s keeping to himself right now. But now Bucky seems to have worn his anger out, and he just sounds sad. “Tony wanted an art history expert,” Steve begins. “I wrote my thesis on representations of the Tesseract legend in artwork around the world, and when Pepper told Tony that I was kind of an authority on—”

“That’s not what I mean,” Bucky says. “I mean that Tony Stark is everything you always hated. A rich capitalist who buys whatever he wants and wastes his money on liquor and showing off instead of using it to do good. So how come you’re here, helping him, instead of back home organizing a union or marching in one of your ma’s protests or something?”

Steve swallows hard. Bucky obviously hasn’t heard about his ma. “I owe a lot of money to a mob boss,” he says. “Had to get out of Brooklyn before the bill came due.”

Bucky snorts. “Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.”

“Tony promised to help me get in the Army,” Steve says.

Bucky turns and looks at him, really looks at him, for the first time since that first night. “Steve,” he says. “You don’t have to fight. You have an _excuse.”_

“About six excuses,” Steve retorts. “And when did you ever know any of them to keep me out of a fight?”

“This isn’t a back-alley brawl, Steve,” Bucky says, his tone getting heated now. “It’s war. Trust me on this. You haven’t been over there. I have. It’s nothing like they make it out to be in the newsreels. It’s… it’s mud and trenchfoot and not being able to get the smell of blood off you. It’s eating breakfast with a guy in the morning and burying him in the afternoon, if there’s enough left to bury. The war ain’t a place for heroes, Steve, it’s a place for survivors.”

“And I ain’t a survivor.” Funny how easy it is, in spite of all those years of education and even a fancy university degree, to slip back into the cadence of Red Hook kids playing stickball in the street. “Because beating everything life threw at me when I was a kid, that wasn’t enough trouble for any ten lifetimes.”

“Yeah, sure,” Bucky says. “You beat scarlet fever when you were nine and your ma called in the priest for last rites. But that’s a thing that happened to you. I’m talking about people deliberately trying to _kill_ you. Yeah, you’ve taken your share of punches, but did you ever take one that left you looking like this?” He shrugs out of his jacket and rolls his sleeve up to the elbow.

It’s the first time Steve has gotten a look at Bucky’s prosthetic arm up close, and the more he stares at it, the more it astounds him. It’s beautiful, in the way the _Avenger_ is beautiful: sleek metal with plates that interlock in sweeping, stylized lines as Bucky clenches and unclenches the fingers. When the plates separate, he can glimpse the edges of the machinery inside, a bizarre combination of clockwork and electrics. And that’s when it hits him: it looks so much like an arm, works so much like an arm, that it’s easy to forget that it’s taking up the space where flesh and blood and bone ought to be.

Steve looks away. “I get it,” he says. “I get it, Buck.

“No, you don’t,” Bucky says, very softly. “Because me, and Clint, and even Tony, that poor bastard—none of us made it home in one piece, exactly, but we made it home. And that, Steve? That means we’re the lucky ones.”

Steve is still searching for something to say to that when Bucky walks away.

 

Later that evening, Clint climbs up the mast of the yacht.

He does this all the time; it’s not exactly a crow’s nest up here, but if he does it right, he can get himself into a comfortable enough position. And it’s quiet. No, really—obviously, everywhere is quiet once you’ve gotten your eardrums blown out by a bomb blast, but up here, it’s _supposed_ to be quiet. There’s no eerie vacuum where there ought to be sloshing ocean waves and creaking timbers, like there is on deck. There’s also nobody to forget you can’t hear them coming and crash into you from behind, which, God bless him, if Tony does it one more time when he’s pacing and talking and waving his hands, Clint is going to turn around and calmly and considerately end his life. Bucky makes jokes about birds’ nests, but Clint feels safer up high. It was being down on the ground that almost killed him.

Besides, he sees better from a distance.

Which is how he sees Peggy Carter climb up onto the deck at five minutes to midnight, and a few minutes later, he sees her reach out and catch Bucky’s arm as he walks by.

At first, Clint thinks this is going to be a typical late-night conversation: _what are you doing up here, can’t sleep, me too,_ and maybe, if Bucky is very smooth and very, very lucky, _do you want to go back to my cabin?_ But that’s not what happens at all. Whatever Peggy says makes Bucky look scared, to start with, and then he quickly moves on to anger as he responds. She answers calmly, and he reaches out as if he’s going to put his hands on her shoulders and shake her, until he catches himself and turns away. Putting his back toward her means turning his face toward Clint, and the angle is terrible for lip reading, especially with that stupid hat casting a shadow over Bucky’s face, but Clint has been practicing this for a while now, and his eyesight is very, very good.

So, yeah. He sees everything.


	4. Ireland

Ireland makes Tony furious.

“Seriously, how _dare_ it,” he says, gesturing around at the landscape flashing by outside the car window: currently, cottages on the outskirts of a tiny village, set between brilliantly green rolling hills where puffy white sheep are grazing. “How dare anyplace be this goddamn _picturesque._ It makes me want to use words like _quaint_ and _charming,_ and I am not the kind of person who says things like that out loud.”

“Relax, Tony,” Steve says. “I’m sure we can find something around here that’ll give you tetanus or leak machine oil onto you sooner or later.”

“We’d better. Christ, this _place._ How did your ancestors stand it?”

“My ancestors were too busy fighting the English and starving to death in the potato famine to be offended by the scenery.”

“Touché,” says Tony, cranking the wheel of the Packard as he pulls off the tarmac and onto a dangerously narrow side road. “Let’s get what we came for and get out before the general delightfulness gets into my bloodstream and kills me.”

Steve grins as he leans back in his seat and watches the hedgerows flash by outside the passenger window. Honestly, he gets where Tony is coming from. There’s a strange air of unreality about the Irish countryside, a place he’s been imagining so long from his mother’s old stories that it’s almost impossible to believe he’s actually seeing it. Now he’s starting to understand why she found it so easy to believe there were pixies under every rock and fairies in every _sídhe_. His fingers are itching for his sketchbook, or better still, for the watercolor set that’s buried somewhere in his luggage, but he doubts he could do the colors justice anyway. At the same time, though, he thought he’d feel more of a connection to the land itself—he expected to set foot on Irish soil and feel like he belonged there. But for all his ancestry sets him apart back in Brooklyn, his American accent and manners have made him just as much of an outsider to the few people he’s spoken to in County Louth. He supposes he should know better by now than to expect miracles.

“You’re shockingly quiet back there, Barnes,” Tony calls toward the backseat. “Everything all right?”

Bucky grunts. He’s been staring out the window for most of the trip, looking unhappy to be there, which is surprising, because Peggy has the middle seat. The Bucky that Steve knew in the old days would have seized the opportunity to flirt. Then again, maybe it’s wise to keep a polite distance; so far, Peggy has spent the whole drive discussing the merits of various projectile weapons with Clint, whose thing in the circus was trick shots. The discussion has gotten fairly technical, but the two of them seem to be in agreement that literally any inanimate object can be used to maim someone if you’re determined enough.

“Rogers!” Tony says, snapping his fingers, and Steve looks up, realizing that Tony has stopped at a crossroads in front of a tall stone pillar—the waymarker the folks in town kept mentioning when asked for directions to Linn Duachaill, usually with a poorly hidden eyeroll at Tony’s terrible pronunciation. He shakes his head and turns toward the driver’s seat.

“Sorry, what?”

“I said, what do you think? Church first, or castle first?”

“Oh.” Steve takes Howard’s journal out of his breast pocket and flips it open, as if looking at it again is going to change anything. “Well, like I said, Howard didn’t narrow it down for us very much. These were his personal notes, not a roadmap. The journal says ‘Found clue to location in ruins at Linn Duachaill,’ but there are two sets of ruins, the church and the castle. There’s probably a third set somewhere, because we know the Vikings built a longfort nearby sometime in the ninth century, but—”

“While we’re young, Steve.” Tony only has the patience for exposition if he’s doing it himself. “Which one’s more likely to have this carving we’re looking for?”

Steve sighs. “It’s a fifty-fifty shot.”

“Fine, okay, great,” Tony says. “Then we’re splitting up.”

“We’re most certainly not,” Peggy says, at the same moment as Bucky says, “That’s a terrible idea.”

“What? We’re not storming Nuremberg, they’re ruins, for God’s sake. Castle’s a mile west, church is half a mile east. We’ll pair off, cover twice the ground, and not have to spend a minute more in this hellishly beautiful place than we have to. We’ll take the radios and call each other if we have any trouble. It’s a solid plan,” he says, turning around. “Tell them it’s a solid plan, Iowa.”

“Tony, you know I couldn’t read your lips until two seconds ago,” Clint complains.

“See? Clint loves my plan. Let’s go.” Tony hops out of the Packard and opens the trunk where the gear is stowed—including an oddly bulky pack that he refuses to discuss, although it’s always the thing he takes out first and keeps closest. “I’m calling dibs on the castle,” he says, tossing the pack in Clint’s direction. “You and Carter are with me. Rogers can have Indiana.”

“No,” Steve says, at the same time as Bucky replies, “The hell you say.”

“The hell I do say, Barnes. Look, there’s a logic to it. What do you find in a church? Names, dates, records. Something needs translating, Rogers is the guy to do it. Besides, churches give me the heebie-jeebies.”

“Afraid you’ll be struck by lightning?” Peggy says mildly.

“I think we’d all agree that it’s a reasonable concern,” Tony cheerfully replies.

“At least let me take Agent Carter,” Steve says, while Bucky crosses his arms and glares at Tony.

“Rogers.” Tony slings his arm around Steve and draws him a little way from the group. “Look, I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I’m doing this for you.”

“How does that work? Tony, Bucky despises me.”

“Exactly. I’m giving you a chance to work out your differences. Trust me, you’ll thank me later.” Tony pats him on the shoulder, shoves Steve’s rucksack into his hands, and says, “Okay, ladies, who’s ready to go? And yes, I’m talking to you, Barton.”

“Tony,” Steve tries again, but it’s obviously too late; Tony is already heading down the westward path. He sighs and turns to Bucky. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”

“Believe me, pal, the sooner the better.” Bucky is still pulling gear out of the trunk of the car: in addition to his pack, his jacket, his hat, and a pair of heavy boots, he’s strapping on a belt with a knife, a pistol, and a long blade in a sheath. Steve closes his eyes briefly so Bucky won’t see him rolling them toward heaven and says, “What is that?”

Bucky lays his metal hand on the hilt of the blade. “Machete,” he says, like Steve is an idiot for asking.

“You don’t think that’s a little bit of overkill for an abandoned church?”

“Not really,” Bucky says. “Considering the kind of shit luck I’ve got, I like to be ready for anything.”

“Really,” Steve says dryly. “You, the genius athlete who all the girls were always after, _you_ have the worst luck around.”

“I got stuck with you, didn’t I?”

“Right,” Steve says. “Fine. Let’s just get through this, and you can go back to pretending I don’t exist.”

“That’s what you think I’m doing? Jesus, Rogers—” Bucky makes a frustrated noise, pulls the brim of his hat down, and starts walking. “Keep up,” he calls, without turning. “You fall in a hole or something, I’m not going back for you.”

Steve wouldn’t dream of asking for help under normal circumstances, but that’s the point where he decides he’ll literally die first. He squares his shoulders, juts his chin out, and follows Bucky down the road.

 

“Huh,” Bucky says, when they’re finally standing in front of the ruins. “It’s in better shape than I figured, for being eleven hundred years old and all.”

“Yeah, we run down the Middle Ages, but people back then knew how to build things to last,” Steve agrees. The roof and doors of the stone building are gone and the interior is open to the sky, but the nave and the chancel are still intact, along with most of a tower. Steve walks under the arch and into the main room, dipping his fingers into a rainwater-filled depression in a stone pillar near the door, then making the sign of the Cross as he steps over the threshold. He expects Bucky, never much of a believer, to have a good laugh about that, but Bucky also hesitates at the doorway, right hand twitching before he shoves it in his pocket, and Steve turns away to hide his grin. A lifetime of Catholicism isn’t so easy to shake.

Steve doubts the sanctuary will yield any clues, but he walks the perimeter anyway, slowly, scanning the crumbling walls and the cracked flagstone floor for anything out of place. Bucky has evidently decided finding the clue is Steve’s job, because he puts his back to the wall and watches, hand on the butt of his pistol, while Steve inspects the larger room, then the smaller one, then the base of the tower. There’s plenty to look at; every blank surface seems to be adorned with a carved saint or Madonna or knotwork design, some of them amazingly sophisticated, and they’ve held up remarkably well for being exposed to the elements. All the same, Steve studied a lot of medieval art when he was writing his dissertation, and there’s nothing here that stands out as a clue to a mystery a thousand years in the making.

“Anything?” Bucky calls out to him, and he shakes his head.

“Plenty that’s interesting, but not what we’re looking for. We’ve still got the graveyard, though.”

“It won’t be out there,” Bucky says.

“What makes you say that?”

Bucky points through one of the windows, at the overgrown churchyard studded with worn stone markers and carved crosses. “The grass is waist-high out there, and Howard Stark is even less of a nature guy than his kid. If he’d had to go looking out there, he would’ve hired somebody to mow it first.”

“Are you kidding me?”

Bucky shrugs. “He’s got a thing about snakes.”

“There are no snakes in Ireland. There’s a whole legend about it!”

“Yeah, but you have no idea how much Howard hates the little fuckers. If it even looks like he might have to set foot in nature, he won’t be taking _any_ chances. Hang on.” The radio transmitter—an impossibly small black box that Bucky has tucked into a jacket pocket—is crackling. He fiddles with the knobs until the static resolves into a voice, then says, “Yeah, Tony, I’m here.”

“Answer faster next time. I’m not paying you to stand around,” Tony says, ignoring the fact that he is, at the moment, literally paying Bucky to stand around. “You find anything?”

“No, despite Rogers turning over every rock in the place. You didn’t either, huh?”

“I’m giving it another hour and then we’re calling it quits,” Tony is saying, when Steve notices something. Turning over every rock… but he hasn’t, has he? There’s an altar at the front of the church, a tall stone thing with stairs on either side and a massive slab covering the top. He’s already looked it over once, but now that he thinks about it…

“Bucky,” he calls, “I think I have something.” If there was an inscription on the altar, it’s long since worn away, but he doesn’t need it now. He taps one of the two figures carved into the front of the altar. “What does this look like to you?”

Bucky walks over to the altar and frowns. “Some saint fighting the devil? I dunno, Steve, you’re the one who was always into the religious stuff.”

“That’s what I thought too. Saint Vincent Ferrer, maybe, because of the hammer—”

“Right, patron of builders,” Bucky says, then looks vaguely disgusted with himself for knowing that. “My uncle Rudy, the one who did construction, he used to wear a Saint Vincent medallion when he was working.”

“—But I don’t remember him fighting any devils, and anyway, look.” Steve traces his finger over the other carving. “If it was Satan, then besides the horns, he’d also have a pitchfork. Look what he has instead.”

“Some kind of staff or something. So what?”

“So these aren’t Christian saints at all. They’re Thor and Loki.”

That gets Bucky’s attention. “Like the gods?”

“Like the gods. Hidden right here in plain sight. And if they’re on the altar…” Steve runs his fingers around the altar’s base. “Stone dust,” he says, and then Bucky gets it, and his eyes widen.

“Move,” he says, bracing his feet and settling his hands against the stone slab over the altar. That metal arm is surprisingly strong; the left side of the slab starts to slide forward at an angle before he even shifts the right side, and Steve occupies himself with wondering if Tony built some kind of hydraulic device into it, which does very little to distract himself from the decidedly ungodly thoughts that creep into his head when he watches the muscles pop in Bucky’s right arm. When the slab falls, it crashes to the ground with a _boom,_ and Steve cringes as a chunk of stone cracks off along the left side: that’s one priceless historic relic damaged beyond repair. But it’s worked, because Bucky, panting slightly, leans over the edge of the altar, looks down, and says, “Damn, you were right. This is an entrance.”

“I know I’m right,” Steve says, to cover the fact that he’s suddenly feeling wary. “If Howard was here,” he says, half to himself, “how did he move that thing?”

“Hired somebody,” Bucky says dismissively. He’s busy fiddling with the radio, trying to get Tony again. “Told you, he always finds somebody else to do the heavy lifting. Hey, Tony! Come in, Tony. We got something over here that you’re gonna want to see.”

“Oh, thank God,” Tony says. “The village might be picturesque, but this castle is downright atmospheric. Tell me you wrote it down so we can go back to the village, because the next thing I want to see in Ireland is the inside of a _very_ well-stocked pub.”

“No, we don’t have it yet, but you should still head over here. You’re gonna want—hey,” Bucky says, as Steve swings his leg over the wall and sets his foot on the top step. “The hell are you doing, Rogers?”

“There’s a staircase,” Steve says, with exaggerated patience. “I’m going down it.”

“No, I mean—” Bucky trails off into a wordless growl. “At least wait until I get you a light,” he says, and then speaks into the radio again: “Tony, it looks like we’re going underground. We might lose the signal, but Clint will be able to follow my trail. Just get over here, okay?” He fishes in the rucksack and comes up with something that looks like a lantern with a metal ring in the center. When he flips a switch on the top, the ring lights up with a dazzlingly bright blue-white glow.

“What is that?” Steve asks.

“One of Tony’s pet projects,” Bucky replies. “Something he’s been working on since he got back from the war.”

“A lamp?”

“An electrical source. He calls it an arc reactor. This arm he built for me, it runs on one.”

Steve raises his eyebrows, impressed. “How long does it last?”

“My arm can go for about a month on one. Unless I do something dumb, like pushing on a big heavy rock, which eats up a lot of power. Tony’s gotten one to last a couple months in his—in a machine he made, but it ran out too, eventually. He’ll figure it out, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, “he doesn’t have a choice. Now move and let me go first, okay?”

Steve might be stubborn—okay, he _is_ stubborn—but he sees the sense in that, so he moves and lets Bucky take point, holding the lantern high in his left hand and reaching for his pistol with his right. But as he follows Bucky down into the dark, he finally figures out what it is that’s been nagging at him since he realized the altar was the entrance.

If Howard Stark moved the slab to get into the tunnel, who moved it back?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like I said, liberties have been taken with geography, but the Annagassan Viking is real. Per Wikipedia:
>
>> There is a legend that one such Viking was stranded after a raid and settled there. The locals believe this Viking heritage is evidenced by the long-held residence of a seafaring man of "mythic proportions" and wild Scandinavian appearance and demeanour, known to the villagers as "The Bear".


	5. The First Clue

The tunnel under the church is chilly and damp, and Steve’s lungs start to protest before he’s navigated fifty feet of it, causing Bucky to shoot him an _I told you so_ look that’s only a little less annoying than Tony’s. “Shut up,” he says, before Bucky can open his mouth. “I can do this.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re thinking it,” Steve says, pushing past him.

Bucky growls and grabs Steve by the shoulder, pulling him back so he can take point again, but aside from the uneven stones and slippery moss, there are no immediate threats. “So what is this place?” he asks. “A catacomb or something?”

“How do you know about catacombs?”

“Oh, excuse me, Mister College Professor Man, I forgot us dumb Brooklyn mooks without letters after our names don’t know shit about shit.”

“That’s not what I said,” Steve says.

“You’re thinking it,” Bucky snaps. And then, after a moment of frosty silence, “We hid in ’em once, is how.”

Steve frowns. “Who?”

“Me and Clint and some French Resistance guys we were working with when Paris fell. Not the best night of my life, is what I’m saying, so if we’re gonna come around a corner and come face to face with a wall of skulls, I’d like to know about it in advance if at all possible.”

Steve grins, remembering a much smaller Bucky who insisted that he wasn’t frightened by Sarah Rogers’ Halloween stories about skeletons climbing up out of the churchyard. He’d made Steve walk the long way around to school for weeks afterward to avoid passing the cemetery. “The Irish would’ve put their dead in the churchyard, and the Vikings preferred either cremation or burial mounds, as a rule. I think we’ll be okay.”

“Good,” Bucky says fervently, before he goes back to looking carefully nonchalant again.

Steve tries to keep track of how far they’re descending, but it’s hard to measure distance or direction underground, especially when the tunnel is riddled with sharp turns and unexpected drops where steps have been carved into the slope. The cobblestones eventually taper off entirely, and the smell of brine and the sound of dripping water increase; with every step, it’s clearer that the man-made tunnel is giving way to a natural cave system. Then the sense of being enclosed lifts; they’ve come out into a larger cavern. The air is less musty here, as if a trickle of fresh air is flowing in from some unseen source.

“Buck,” Steve says, “give me a little more light,” and Bucky raises the lantern higher, confirming his theory; the ceiling is no longer in view—but something else is. He walks forward, and the shadows start to resolve into a mold-covered wooden shape.

“The hell,” Bucky says. “Is that what I think it is?”

“If you think it looks like somebody brought a Viking longboat down here, then yeah.” Steve is getting excited now; this has to be the source of Howard’s clue. He takes the lantern from Bucky, steps up onto the slab, and looks down into the ship.

“Well?” says Bucky.

“Well, I was partly right,” Steve says. “They did give the Viking a burial mound. I just didn’t realize this whole cave was it.”

“Oh, shit,” Bucky moans. “Is he all skeletonized? Dead is okay, but not _bony.”_

“Don’t worry about it,” Steve says, because he doesn’t want to lie. He shines the lantern carefully over the interior of the boat. The body has shrunk, and what’s left of the skin and bones is crumbling—Steve has a feeling that if he breathes too hard, they’ll disintegrate—but the corroded armor is more or less intact. From the size of it, Steve can tell this Viking was a huge man when he was alive, with hair that might have been red or blonde before time bleached it to the color of dust. “No weapon,” he says. “That’s weird. They usually would’ve put his sword in with him.”

“Yeah, but a sword isn’t part of the story, is it? I mean, in the Tesseract legend, it was always a guy with a magic staff fighting a guy with a magic hammer.”

“You’re right. I wonder…” Steve and shines the light on a tall upright stone that rests in front of the ship. There’s a carving, similar to the one on the altar, but rougher; this one shows a helmeted Viking pointing a staff at a square surrounded by squiggly lines that might represent a glow, and a beam of light from the square pointing to a third item, a hammer. When he looks closely, he can see traces of paint: gold on the staff, blue on the stone, silver on the hammer. “This is a runestone,” he says, tracing a finger over a row of letters that weaves around the carving. “They made them to commemorate someone who died on a raid, which I guess he technically did, since he never went home.”

“What does it say?” Bucky asks.

“I dunno,” Steve says, still smarting a little from Bucky’s _college professor man_ comment. “How’s your Elder Futhark?”

“You kiss your ma with that mouth?” Bucky frowns. “You saying you can’t read it?”

“I didn’t say _can’t,_ but I’m gonna have to work it out.” One of the greatest disappointments of Steve’s academic career was finding out that translating ancient text is nothing like the pulp novels of his childhood led him to believe. Nobody actually recognizes every ancient language on sight, half the words will probably have more than one possible meaning _if_ they’re even in the old Norse dictionary he brought, and it never translates to a catchy little rhyming poem. “I think I see _water_ and _grave,_ and this could be _hammer_ , maybe _._ I’ll work it out later. I don’t think the writing is what Howard Stark was after, though.”

“Neither do I,” Bucky says, and when Steve glances at him, inviting him to go on, he says, “Howard said he found a clue in the ruins, but he didn’t mention anything about having to go get it translated. And I know he doesn’t speak Elder Fuckit or whatever you called it.”

Bucky has a damn near photographic memory and knows perfectly well what Steve called it, but he’s also so obviously trying to get a rise out of Steve that it’s not worth the fight. “If our Viking is missing his weapon, then maybe that’s what Howard found. But we still might get something out of this.” Steve sets the lantern down, opens his rucksack, and fishes out a blank sheet of newsprint and a stick of graphite he brought along for exactly this situation.

“You’re doing a grave rubbing?” Bucky looks impressed. “Wow, that’s way less stupid than most of your ideas.”

“Careful, Buck. You work any harder to avoid giving me a compliment, you’re liable to hurt yourself.” Steve positions the paper over the runes and rubs the graphite over them, working as quickly and carefully as he can. It’s not perfect, but he doesn’t have a camera, and even if he did, he’s sure it would be hellishly difficult to develop plates shot in such dim light, so it will have to do. He folds the paper, careful not to smudge it, until it’s small enough to be tucked inside Howard’s journal; then the journal goes back into its oilcloth covering and the whole package goes back into his jacket. He picks up the lantern and asks, “So, you wanna go a little further in and make sure we’re not missing anything before we head back?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, “we’ll keep going.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Barnes,” says a voice behind Steve, “I think you’ve come to the end of the line.”

 

Steve whips around and finds himself staring down the barrel of a pistol. Bucky goes for his own gun, but the soft _click_ of the stranger switching off the safety is enough to freeze his hand in mid-motion. “Who are you?” he demands.

“The first of many.” The man is Irish, from his accent, so not some enemy of Howard Stark’s from New York, probably. Steve can’t see much of his face in the shadows, but he thinks he recognizes the voice: one of the local guys Tony was asking for directions earlier, maybe. “Give me Stark’s book.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then I’ll shoot your friend,” the stranger says, “and _then_ I’ll shoot you.”

“Okay, just give me a second,” Steve says. He raises the hand holding the lantern, trying to look innocent, and reaches into his breast pocket with the other. “So who are you with?” he asks, as casually as he can manage.

“Steve, this is no time for small talk,” Bucky says. He’s frozen in place, with his own hands in the air.

“No,” Steve says, “it’s like that time you and me went after the Dooley kids down on Livingston Street.” He’s praying that Bucky will remember it as sharply as he does. “I think I have the right to know who’s gonna kill me, though. Are you with the Ailtirí na hAiséirghe?”

The stranger spits. “The Architects of the Resurrection are children. We’re part of something much more glorious. Now give. Me. The. Book.”

“Give the crazy gunman the book, Steve,” Bucky says, with a sharp edge of nerves in his voice.

“Okay.” Steve holds the book up, says, “Catch,” and hurls the lantern at the guy instead.

He throws himself to the side as the lantern spins through the air, and the muzzle flash of the pistol half-blinds him as it fires, but the guy misses by a mile, and then Bucky is on him. Steve doesn’t see what happens, but there’s a wet squelching sound, and then Bucky is pulling him up and snatching up the lantern. “Still think a machete is overkill?” he says, panting. “Come on: he won’t be working alone, and that shot just brought all his buddies down on us. We gotta run.”

Steve can already hear yelling from somewhere back down the tunnel: multiple voices, he can’t tell how many. Trying to ignore the fact that Bucky has grabbed his hand—that Bucky is _holding his hand,_ and not letting go—Steve runs, praying he’s not about to slip on a loose stone or take a header into an open pit. Somehow, both of them stay on their feet long enough for Bucky to pull him into the tunnel at the far end of the room. “Fucking bastards,” he whispers. “You okay, Stevie?”

“Yeah.” Steve is wheezing and his heart is pounding, but it’s not as if he’s never survived worse. If the situation was any less desperate, he might be thinking real hard about the fact that Bucky just draped his right arm around him and called him _Stevie,_ so it’s probably a good thing they’re in such deep shit. “You know these guys?”

“Yeah.” Bucky’s voice is grim. “Hydra. We gotta get out of here now.” He lets go of Steve—which shouldn’t be as disappointing as it is—and fiddles with the radio again, but all he gets is a burst of static. “We gotta get someplace with a signal so Tony can find us.”

“What’s Tony gonna do?” Steve says. He’d rather have Peggy, to be honest. But he follows Bucky, and the two of them run.

Steve has been through some harrowing things in his lifetime, but the next few minutes of gut-wrenching terror put Sarah Rogers’ best ghost stories to shame. The tunnel floor is smoother and slicker here, opening up into unexpected dips and at least once, a pit he can’t see the bottom of, so he doesn’t know if he narrowly avoids falling three feet or a hundred. The lantern seems to have been damaged in its fall, because the light is popping and wavering like a lightbulb that’s about to blow out; Steve doesn’t know what they’ll do if it fails and leaves them in the dark. Mercifully there’s only one way to go, so they don’t have to guess at directions in a maze of tunnels, but that means there’s nowhere to duck off into a side tunnel and hide when the shouts behind them start to get louder. Their pursuers obviously know these tunnels and don’t have to watch for pitfalls or traps, and their shouts, in Irish, echo off the cave walls, making it impossible to gauge how far behind they are. More than once, Steve turns back, expecting to see them coming around the corner. “Don’t look, _move,”_ Bucky snaps, pulling him forward, and he does.

They round a corner, and Steve yelps out loud as he splashes into cold water that immediately soaks through his boots. Then he realizes the light has changed: he can see real, blessed daylight through an opening at the far end of the cave... which would be great if it wasn’t _across_ an underground pool of inky black water that’s God knows how deep.

Bucky tosses the lantern back toward the tunnel entrance, where it bursts in a shower of sparks, and grabs Steve’s hand, again, which Steve is definitely going to say something about if they get out of this alive. “We have to swim for it, c’mon,” he says, and unceremoniously dumps Steve into the water.

It can’t be more than a second before Steve’s instincts kick in and he thrashes until he gets his head above water, but it feels like an eternity. The water is _freezing,_ and every muscle he has clenches tight; only the fact that it would be embarrassing to drown here forces him to lift his arms and start swimming. His clothes and boots weigh him down so heavily that he almost goes under. But Bucky grabs him and keeps him afloat, then pulls him out on the other side of the lake and onto a narrow ledge of stone. Bullets ping off the cave wall behind them as Bucky shoves him out through a narrow cave mouth.

“Tony!” Bucky yells, as he emerges into daylight, and if Steve wasn’t shivering too hard to talk, he’d tell him it’s useless, that stupid radio receiver will never work now, but then he realizes that Bucky isn’t messing with the radio; he’s waving his arms toward the sky.

A figure is streaking through the air toward them, moving so fast that it takes Steve’s brain longer than it should to process that he’s looking at a human—a literal flying human, wearing a red leather jacket, a sleek gold helmet with sweeping lines like a racecar, and a metal tank strapped to his back. Steve’s inner ten-year-old, the one who kept himself sane when he was stuck in bed for weeks at a time with as many radio dramas and science fiction novels as he could get his grubby little hands on, immediately recognizes this as a _rocket pack._ Coils of wire and metal tubing run down the sleeves of the jacket, hooked to gloves with what looks like a small arc reactor attached to each palm.

The flying man pulls up sharply and hovers in front of them about three feet off the ground, and the effect is so weird that when the faceplate on the helmet flips up to reveal Tony’s face, it actually makes the whole business feel a hundred percent more normal. “What happened to you two?” he demands.

“No time, Stark. We got some local Hydra goons on our tails. How much firepower you got in that thing?”

“Hydra?” Tony repeats, and his expression suddenly turns cold. “How many?”

“Couldn’t get a read. Maybe five or six?”

“So maybe more,” Tony says. “Anything in that cave we can’t destroy?”

“Only a pristine Viking burial site full of previously unknown medieval art that could change how we study a whole era in European history,” Steve says.

“One old dead guy in a boat,” says Bucky.

“Right. I’m going with Barnes on this one. Okay, stand back,” Tony says. “And you might want to cover your ears.”

“Wait—” Steve says, before Tony raises his hand and points the glowing circle on his palm at the cave mouth. There’s a hum that rises rapidly in pitch, and a beam of light shoots from Tony’s hand toward the cave mouth. The stone shatters, and rubble and rock dust tumble down with a deafening crash.

Steve’s ears are still ringing when the Packard comes racing up, Peggy driving, Clint leaning out the passenger window with a shotgun at the ready—which he puts away, with visible reluctance, when he sees the dust rising from the debris. “Aw, explosions,” he says. “I always miss all the fun.”

“Is everyone all right?” Peggy asks.

“Hopefully some Hydra bastards aren’t,” Bucky says, slicking his wet hair back and settling his hat back on his head. Steve has no idea how he managed to hang onto it in all this. “Pardon the language, ma’am.”

Peggy’s eyes scan the scene, and she sets her jaw. “I see. Well, I guess we’d better be gone by the time they find another way out, assuming any of them survived.”

“Count on it,” Clint says, his tone dark. “You know what their motto is.”

“Hydra,” Steve repeats. Maybe it’s just the way Bucky said it, but even the word feels evil in his mouth. He starts to ask what it means, but another uncontrollable fit of shivering hits him, and Peggy throws the car into park and gets out to take a couple of wool blankets out of the trunk. “Here,” she says, handing one to Steve. “We’d best warm you up. And I’m sure you want dry off, too, Mr. Barnes. It wouldn’t be pleasant for you if that arm got rusted, would it?”

“Why don’t we meet back at the hotel, Agent Carter?” Tony says, with the widest grin Steve has ever seen on his face. “I’m going to do a little cleanup first.” Then he flips a switch on the side of the rocket pack and launches himself straight up into the sky.

There’s a moment of startled silence all around. Then Clint mutters, “Goddamn showoff,” and Steve climbs into the back seat of the car, wondering if he’ll be able to feel his toes by the time they get back to town.

Bucky waits until they’re underway and Clint and Peggy have resumed a low conversation—something about Tony and his rocket pack; Steve is too busy trying not to let his teeth chatter to follow it. Once they’re both distracted, though, Bucky leans over and says softly, “The grave rubbing. Is it okay?”

“It’s wrapped up in oilcloth, so it should be.” Steve starts to reach into his pocket for it, and Bucky puts his metal hand over Steve’s.

“Do me a favor and keep that between us for a little bit, okay?” he asks, blue eyes fixed on Steve’s.

Steve raises his eyebrows. “I’m gonna have to tell Tony eventually. Otherwise we don’t know where to go next.”

“It’s not Tony I’m worried about,” Bucky says, and then he settles back in his seat and doesn’t look at Steve again for the rest of the ride to Dundalk.


	6. History

Leave it to Tony Stark to go chasing off to Ireland for a clue about an ancient Viking treasure, tangle with a group of fanatics who seem to be dead set on preventing them from getting it, escape by blowing up a hillside, and then somehow manage to cap it all off by arranging lodgings in a castle. No, really: it’s a bona fide castle on the outside, but the inside has been converted into a luxury hotel, complete with thick woven carpets and Waterford crystal chandeliers that wouldn’t be out of place at the Ritz. Steve tries not to touch anything for fear of breaking it.

Peggy insists on accompanying Steve to his room, which is is larger than the entire apartment he grew up in, and breaks up with laughter when he stammers something about her reputation. “Oh, we are so far past that point, Steve,” she says, laughing, as she takes his jacket and hangs it over a chair. “Besides, I’m eager to hear all about what happened in the tunnels.”

“It’s just like Bucky told you in the car,” Steve says, puzzled. “We found a Viking grave. We ran into a guy who tried to shoot us, got out of it with a lot of luck, got chased by his buddies, and you saw how that ended.” He hesitates. “Maybe you can tell me something, though. What exactly is Hydra, and what do they have to do with Tony Stark? Because, don’t get me wrong, they didn’t endear themselves to me today, but with Tony, it seemed… kinda personal.”

“That’s one way to describe it,” Peggy says, perching on the edge of an armchair. Steve sits across from her on the sofa. He wants to get out of his wet clothes and collapse into bed, but he wants this story more. “Have you ever heard of Johann Schmidt?”

“No,” Steve says. “Who is he?”

“A Nazi general. Brilliant, ambitious, obsessed with power. He and Hitler share a passion for mythology. But where Hitler uses the ideology to inspire his followers, Schmidt really believes in it. He’s convinced that the gods left some powerful artifacts on earth, just waiting to be seized and used by an _Übermensch,_ a superior man. There was a scientist, Dr. Abraham Erskine, who developed a formula for a serum that Schmidt believed would make him into a god. Schmidt took the serum, but it wasn’t complete. It made him strong, but there were… unfortunate side effects.”

“What happened to him?”

“Officially, the project failed, and Schmidt was put in charge of Hitler’s research division and squirreled away in a laboratory in Austria. Unofficially, he’s gathered up a bunch of fanatics like himself, the worst of the worst. They call themselves Hydra, and he’s their leader.”

“So what does this have to do with Tony Stark?”

“Schmidt was still trying to force Erskine to perfect the serum about the same time Pearl Harbor was hit. When the U.S. entered the war, Tony enlisted. The Army had no intention of risking one of their geniuses in combat, so they sent him to London to work in weapons development. It was an open secret that he’d get bored occasionally and take one of his inventions out for a test run. Eventually, Hydra shot down one of the experimental planes and used its homing beacon to lure him out on an unsanctioned rescue mission. When he crossed the Channel, Schmidt had troops waiting for him. They took him to Schmidt’s lab and tried to force him to perfect Erskine’s formula.”

“Is that when he was wounded?”

“Yes, but he didn’t let that slow him down. He convinced Schmidt that the formula would work better if they built a sort of chamber to administer it, but what he and Erskine really built was a rocket pack—a prototype of the one you saw today—attached to an armored suit. Erskine was killed in the escape attempt, but Tony got away. He’s had it in for Schmidt and Hydra ever since.”

“So Schmidt must have found out what Howard Stark was up to,” Steve says. “But how? If Tony didn’t even know…”

“I don’t know. But that’s why it’s so important that we catch up with Howard as quickly as we can. I know you didn’t find what you were after under the church, but...” Peggy leans forward and puts her hand on Steve’s thigh. “Are you sure there’s nothing else you can tell me? No hints that might let us skip ahead and give us a better chance of catching up to Howard, instead of retracing his steps?”

Steve’s heart is suddenly pounding. Peggy can’t possibly mean anything by this—it’s just too absurd to think a woman this beautiful would actually want anything to do with him—but if she thinks she can inspire him to some kind of epiphany, well, on another day she might be right. But today, there are two problems with that: first, he’s still half-frozen and smells like mud and cave water, which is kind of killing the mood, and second, he can practically still feel Bucky’s hand wrapping around his.

“Peggy,” he says, trying not to let his voice waver, “I think I can safely say nobody wants this trip to be over as much as I do. I… appreciate what you’re doing here, and of course I’ll tell Tony the minute I come up with anything, but I’m not going to figure it out tonight. Right now, I’d just like to get some rest.” He stands up and pointedly opens the hotel room door.

Peggy watches him for a few more seconds, head tipped to one side, studying him with that faintly surprised look she seems to wear a lot around him. Then she smiles and stands up, graceful as always. “I see. Of course, I’ll get out of your hair. And please don’t take my... behavior just now the wrong way.”

“There’s nothing to take wrong,” Steve says firmly. “I always enjoy talking to you, Peggy.”

Is it his imagination, or does she look just a little bit wistful? “So do I,” she says, and, to his surprise, leans in as she passes him and gives him a peck on the cheek—the kind of kiss that can’t possibly be interpreted as anything but friendly. The change in her demeanor leaves him relieved, but more than a little confused. Then it occurs to him that her SSR superiors have probably ordered her to use every advantage at her disposal to get results out of this team, and that turns every look and touch into a means to an end. If Steve was in her position, he isn’t sure he could put up with Tony’s incessant flirting, even for the sake of a mission. She’s probably just grateful to have one person she can drop the act around, that’s all.

There’s a big clawfooted tub in the room, and Steve runs himself the hottest bath possible, strips off his wet clothes, and sinks into the water. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees the muzzle flash of the pistol again, but it’s not the close shave that bothers him; it’s the nagging question of how Hydra knew where to find them, and why they came after him and Bucky. If they want to prevent Tony from finding his father, why not attack him directly? Maybe they’re trying to manipulate Tony by taking one or more of his friends as a hostage. Still, having seen Tony’s face when he went after the Hydra team today, Steve has to wonder whether even that would be enough to stop him when his heart is set on revenge.

Steve broods about it until the bathwater gets cold, but he’s no closer to an answer when he gets out of the tub. He’s wrapping himself up in a thick hotel robe (okay, that’s one thing about Tony’s extravagant lifestyle that he could get used to) when somebody knocks on the door. “Who is it?” he calls, expecting Tony to breeze in—the door’s locked, but that rarely stops Tony—and gloat about his battlefield victory.

“If I say it’s the guy who saved your life today,” Bucky’s voice calls back, gravelly and tired, “do I get to come in?”

“No,” Steve says, as he crosses the room and opens the door. “But if it’s my old friend Bucky, I’ll let him in, I guess.”

Bucky manages a smile, although it looks like it takes a lot out of him. “You know,” he says, “I’m not so sure I’m still that guy, Stevie.”

“I am,” says Steve, swinging the door wide. “Come in.”

Bucky does, then turns and locks the door behind him. Steve raises an eyebrow, and Bucky looks vaguely guilty. “I just can’t handle any more Tony right now,” he says, making it almost a plea, and Steve can’t help laughing, just a little.

“We’re on the same page. What’s that?”

“Oh.” Bucky raises his mechanical hand; he seems to have forgotten it’s holding a whiskey bottle. “Peace offering, in case you wouldn’t let me in. Worst case, I figured I could convince you it’s medicinal. I remember how easy you used to get sick.”

Steve appreciates that _used to,_ even though they both know it’s a polite fiction. There are a couple of glasses on the dresser; he brings them to Bucky, who’s seated himself on the still-damp sofa, and watches him pull the cork with metal fingers. “Sláinte,” he says, when Bucky hands him a glass, and swallows a slug of the liquor, wincing as it burns its way down his throat. “You can tell me if it’s not okay to ask,” he begins, carefully, “but can I look at your hand again?”

Bucky nods and holds out his metal hand, and Steve turns it over, examining the joints of the fingers, the plates in the palm that lock together so tight that they’re almost seamless. There’s a divot in one of the plates halfway up the forearm, and Steve starts when he realizes what it is. “Is this from a bullet?”

“Yeah. Must’ve caught it in the cave. No harm done. I’ll get Tony to hammer it out next time he does maintenance.”

“Did it hurt?” Steve asks, frowning.

“Nah. The machine picks up twitches in what’s left of my real arm and figures out what I want it to do, but it’s a one-way transmitter. Tony looked for a way to give me sensation in it, but it doesn’t seem like there is one, short of shoving wires in my brain. I told him I’d pass.” He shrugs. “Anybody else would see this thing as a miracle, but Tony gets frustrated because he thinks of all these things he could do if he didn’t have to invent everything from scratch. He has a lot of ideas for stuff like this, but everybody just wants him to build guns and bombs. It’s funny, the two of you couldn’t be more different, but sometimes he reminds me of you, the way you always wanted to change the world.”

“They don’t want me to build guns,” Steve says. “They say I’m not even fit to fire one. Bucky, I know what you went through in the war was terrible. And contrary to what everybody thinks, it’s not that I love fighting. I just have this gut feeling that I’m supposed to be helping people in a more direct way than, you know, collecting scrap metal in a little red wagon. I know that sounds arrogant—”

“It sounds brave,” Bucky says. After a beat, he adds, “I used to think I was meant for bigger things too. Excellent student, star athlete, all that stuff that seemed so important when I was a kid… I was gonna be a doctor, you know. Gonna fix people for a living, like your ma did. Life has a way of not giving a shit what we want, I guess.”

“I guess.” Steve takes a deep breath. “Bucky, I just need to know. When you didn’t write me, after you moved back to Indiana... was it what I said? On that night... you remember.”

The last part isn’t a question, because there’s no way in hell Bucky doesn’t remember exactly what Steve said to him on his last night in Brooklyn. In fact, for a minute, he thinks the horrified expression that comes over Bucky’s face is because he’s been trying not to think about it for nine years. Then Bucky says, “Stevie,” and Steve knows, even before he growls, “if I’d had _any idea_ that was what you thought, I would’ve made a trip back to Brooklyn with the express purpose of kicking your ass.”

“Then why—”

“My dad died,” says Bucky.

“Oh,” Steve says. _“Oh._ Bucky, I’m so sorry. When?”

“A couple weeks after we got to Indiana. I _was_ gonna write you, I just hadn’t yet because… because if I took a while to tell you I loved you too, you would’ve believed I’d thought it through and I was sure.” Bucky is carefully not looking at him; his eyes are on the metal hand, and he’s flexing the fingers. “You were right when you said it’d be hard to make a life, you and me, but you were also right that we could’ve figured it out. I figured I’d stay in Shelbyville until I was sure my family was settled in, and then I’d go home to Brooklyn. To you. But then Dad fell asleep after supper one night and never woke up, and it was a damn good thing I hadn’t made any promises to you, because all of a sudden, I was the man of the house, and Ma and the girls needed me more than you did. I never went back to school. I got a job—factory work, it wasn’t too bad, but the pay was shit, like it was everywhere in 1934. I knew that even if I got promoted, with five mouths to feed, we were always gonna be just scraping by. Then one night Becca and I went up to Indianapolis to go to a jazz club—it was her birthday, and I just wanted to give her one thing that was nice—and this drunk guy started getting handsy with her, and I… I was carrying around a lot of anger, you know?”

“I might have a general idea what that’s like,” says Steve.

“Yeah. Remember what Ma used to say about her brothers, that the Murdock boys had the devil in them? I guess I got a little of that too, because I just let the guy have it, right there in the club. The owner saw the whole thing, and he had his bouncers grab me. I thought I was gonna go home minus some teeth, but instead he offered me a job. On paper it was just hauling stuff and making deliveries, but it was pretty clear I’d have to rough up guys for him occasionally. I knew it was a bad idea, and you would’ve hated it, but the _money,_ Stevie, the money was so good. So I started working for him, and I gradually got in deeper and deeper. I had no idea how connected he was when I started, but pretty soon I was…”

“What, Buck?”

“Well, let’s just say I wasn’t exactly sticking up banks with guys like John Dillinger and George Barrett and Pretty Boy Floyd, but I might have been in some cars with those guys a time or two, and those cars might have been proceeding away from banks pretty quickly at the time, and I might have been sorta kinda firing a sawed-off shotgun at the cops behind us.”

“Jesus Christ, Bucky.”

“Language,” Bucky says. It’s one of their oldest jokes, and for a second he smiles, but it fades quickly. “Anyway, I figured out pretty fast that I was in way over my head. I was still talking tough, pretending I was cold as ice about the whole thing, but I was scared as hell. I wanted out, but I couldn’t afford to piss those guys off, because if they took it out on Ma or the girls…”

“What happened?” Steve asks, after a moment.

Bucky lowers his head and twists his flesh hand around his metal one. “I got caught, eventually. I think I kind of wanted to. So I flipped, spilled my guts about everything. It wasn’t enough to get me off the hook completely, but it was enough that the FBI offered me a deal: jail or Army. I picked Army. Funny story, around the same time, Clint was getting the same offer a couple of states over. It was nothing like the trouble I was in; he just got caught picking pockets once too often in his carnie days. Oh, uh, I should’ve warned you to watch your wallet around Clint, by the way. He won’t keep it, he just likes to mess with people.”

“Duly noted.”

“Anyway, we both wound up in a special unit—hard cases, criminals who maybe weren’t as reformed as we could’ve been. They tended to throw us the really nasty jobs, but we were working for the U.S. Army, so at least I was back on the right side of the law. Even got promoted, got to put a chevron on my shoulder and make the guys call me Sarge. After Pearl Harbor happened and we were officially in the war, the Army assigned us to Howard Stark, and we got to field-test his experimental shit and steal Nazi tech for him to reverse-engineer. It was a great gig until the day we accidentally walked smack into half the German army. And the rest is history.”

Steve is quiet for a long moment, head spinning, before he says, “I wish you’d told me.”

“That I was mixed up with the fucking _mob?_ Yeah, because you would’ve thought real highly of me then. That’s part of why I lost my cool when I saw you walking on board the _Avenger_ like some kind of ghost out of my past.” He reaches for the whiskey and doesn’t bother to pour it into a glass, just swigs straight from the bottle. “You think you know who I am, Stevie. I can see it on your face every time you look at me. But I’m not the guy you knew in ’34 anymore. I’m not the guy you loved anymore. I’m a guy who’s done things I’m pretty sure even you couldn’t forgive.”

“Give me that bottle,” says Steve.

He gets a fair amount of the whiskey into him before Bucky says, “Whoa, hey,” and takes the bottle back. “Whatever you’re gonna tell me, it can’t be that bad.”

“It’s not the same, but it’s pretty bad,” Steve begins. “I was in college, and Ma was working as a nurse in a TB ward. She got hit, couldn’t shake it.”

“Aw, no,” says Bucky, seeing where this is headed.

“Yeah.” Steve keeps his voice even. It takes some doing. “The doctors wanted to send her to a sanatorium. I wanted to quit school and take care of her. She begged me not to. From the day I was born, she’d been working and sacrificing so I could have an education, and it would’ve broken her heart if I gave it up. There was no good choice. So I did what you do in Brooklyn when you’re desperate. I went to Wilson Fisk.”

“You went to the Kingpin?” Bucky says, eyes widening. “Steve, that was _stupid._ If I’d been there, I never would’ve let you do it.”

“Well, I did. I thought that once Ma got better and started working again, we’d be able to pay him off. Only she didn’t get better. She died in the sanatorium.”

“Jesus,” Bucky says. “Steve… I mean, my dad was _our_ old bastard, but he was still an old bastard, you know? Your ma, though, she was the best of us.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, because there’s really nothing else to say about it.

“What about the Kingpin?” Bucky asks.

“It’s not so bad. Mostly I can pay Fisk’s guys when they come knocking, unless it’s been a bad month and I’ve got doctors’ bills of my own. If I can’t, they beat me up enough to make a point.” Steve shrugs. “Honestly, it’s usually less than the Dooley kids used to do to me before you put the fear of God in ’em. The point is, I took Fisk’s money, and I pretended my hands were clean because I was doing it for Ma. But really, the only reason I haven’t been dragged in any deeper is because I couldn’t be as useful to them as you.”

“So what you’re saying,” Bucky says thoughtfully, “is that you’re just as stupid without me around as I am without you.”

“Obviously. So we should probably stick together so we can keep each other from doing stupid things again, huh?”

“Oh, we’ll still do stupid things,” Bucky says. “From now on, we’ll just make sure we get Tony to pay us to do them. Working with you today was pretty great, Stevie.”

“Great?” Steve bursts out laughing. “We almost died!”

“Yeah, but we didn’t. And tell me you didn’t enjoy it at least a little. I mean, we were fighting Nazis, and that’s what you wanted, right?”

“You fought Nazis. I ran away.”

“Only after I made you, which means you really, really haven’t changed since we were kids.”

Steve takes a deep breath. It’s true: Bucky was always the planner, the one with contingencies for the contingencies, and Steve is the one who forges ahead with his heart instead of his brain. Which means that if Steve doesn’t want to wait for Bucky to think this through in excruciating detail too, then he’s the one who has to do something about it.

“I guess that means we can pick up where we left off,” he says, and follows Peggy’s lead, laying his hand on Bucky’s thigh.

Bucky starts. Then his lips curve into a slow smile, and he bends his head down to press them against Steve’s.

Outside of picking fights, it’s been a long time since Steve has deliberately touched anybody, beyond the occasional handshake or pat on the back. He teaches young girls, so he’s careful how he acts toward them, and his adult colleagues tend to keep a professional distance. Beyond that… well, there’s really nobody beyond that. Okay, so there’ve been a handful of awkward, fumbling encounters in back rooms or alleys behind whatever queer bar he nerved himself to go into in his bleakest moments, always safely anonymous and deeply unsatisfying. And he always woke up the next day hating himself, never wanting to admit that the real problem was that he was still hung up on a guy he hadn’t seen in three or five or eight years. He even thought he’d come to terms with it, that he just wasn’t made for what other people found so effortless: lovers, partners, families. He resigned himself to being lonely so hard that he almost forgot there was another way to be.

Until Bucky.

Bucky’s mouth is warm and soft on his, and his arms slide around Steve’s back, pulling him closer, the left arm looped over the right one so he won’t squeeze too hard by accident. Steve has no time for that kind of caution. He gets up on his knees on the seat of the couch and swings one leg over Bucky’s hips, straddling him. Bucky looks up at him with those piercingly blue eyes, while a pink blush spreads over his cheeks and down his chest, under the collar of his shirt where the top two buttons are undone. And maybe it’s the whiskey and maybe it isn’t, but Steve’s hands are trembling as he undoes the next button and starts to tug the fabric out of the way.

Bucky reaches up and catches his hand. “Leave it,” he says. “I got some scars you don’t wanna see.”

Steve slides the tips of his fingers down Bucky’s cheek, over the faint growth of stubble on his jaw, down his throat. Then he retraces the same path with his mouth, feeling Bucky shudder when he murmurs against the side of his neck, “Buck, we don’t have to hide anything from each other.”

Bucky’s breath catches in what sounds almost like a sob. “Are you sure?”

“I’m always sure,” Steve says, and undoes the rest of the buttons.

Under the shirt, there’s a crisscross of straps running across Bucky’s chest, and Steve gets briefly but thoroughly derailed by the way the prosthetic’s harness loops under his other arm and over his shoulder, drawing his eyes inexorably down to Bucky’s bared left nipple. He traces the edge of his thumbnail across it and grins when Bucky shivers. Bucky’s left hand is resting on his waist, still and heavy; his right hand is behind Steve’s head, fingers twining in his hair. He starts to press Steve closer, then stops, and Steve can feel the tension radiating from him. “What is it?” he asks.

“I just…” Bucky looks into his eyes, actually _scared,_ and Steve suddenly understands that Bucky is caught between the hot shame of hating his own body and the same touchy pride that makes Steve refuse to back his small, sick self into corners: _yeah, I see you staring, asshole, and I dare you to pity me._ Drawing it out any longer won’t do Bucky any favors, so he slides the shirt the rest of the way down and takes a good long look at what’s left of Bucky’s arm.

Honestly, it’s not as bad as he expected. The flesh stops a few inches below the shoulder, where it slots into the harness that secures the prosthetic to the stump. The part of the arm that’s on display to the world is impeccably crafted, but this, Steve sees, is the real technological wonder: a system of thin metal discs wired into one of the straps and resting securely against Bucky’s skin. These must be the sensors he was talking about, the ones that read his motions and tell the prosthetic how to behave. The whole business is wired into another arc reactor, this one a red circle inside a sleek metal housing that curves upward from the top of the prosthetic, like a glowing brand on Bucky’s shoulder.

“Tony’s working on a cover for me to put over that whole mess—” Bucky begins.

“Shh.” Steve touches one of the sensor discs with a fingertip and feels a tiny vibration, a faint hum like a radio that’s been switched on and turned to the lowest volume. Then he slides his fingertip under the harness and runs it along a deep, rippled crease of scar tissue. Bucky watches him, probably not intentionally holding his breath, until he says, “How much can you do with this arm? Show me.”

Bucky obligingly lifts his left hand and starts to flex the fingers one by one, until Steve shakes his head and moves it, setting the metal palm against his cheek. “Show me,” he repeats.

Bucky looks nervous, but he obediently slides his open hand down Steve’s throat, over his collarbone and under the neck of the robe. He’s careful, working by sight instead of touch, but he risks a tiny, tentative squeeze when he reaches Steve’s nipple, and when Steve lets out a startled laugh, he smiles in obvious relief. “So you don’t want me to take it off?”

“Do you want to?”

“No,” Bucky says quickly. “I hate taking it off.”

“Then we won’t. Hey,” Steve says, alarmed, because Bucky’s eyes are unexpectedly wet. “Shh. It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

“That’s the thing,” Bucky says, his voice thick. “It _is_ okay. You really don’t care about any of it. Steve…” He pulls Steve down on top of him, both arms around him now, drawing him in for a long, openmouthed kiss so perfect that Steve never wants to end. And then Bucky rocks him backward, throwing him down onto the couch and pulling the robe open.

Having people look at his skinny, frail body isn’t exactly Steve’s favorite thing either, but Bucky’s expression is downright worshipful. His fingertips stroke a line down Steve’s breastbone, across his chest and down the curve of his ribs, stopping only when they brush the fine hair at the base of Steve’s stomach. Then he just stares. “God, you’re beautiful,” he says.

“Hardly,” Steve says, with a faint smile.

“You _are._ If they could see what I see, every girl in Red Hook would want to take a bite out of you.” Steve opens his mouth to argue, but before he gets a word out, Bucky has his head between Steve’s thighs. Steve was half-hard already, but when Bucky strokes his tongue up the length of his dick and takes him into that perfect mouth of his, the bottom drops out of the world. He gasps, digging his fingers into Bucky’s shoulders as Bucky works him over, too-long hair brushing his skin every time he pushes his mouth down.

Steve never wants this to end, but at the same time, his whole body feels ready to explode—and then Bucky pulls away. He tries to tell Bucky why that’s a terrible idea, but all that comes out of his mouth is a wordless sound of frustration, and Bucky laughs breathlessly at him and reaches up to stroke his cheek. “Do you want me to keep doing that,” he asks, his voice dipping low, the way it always did when he flirted with girls in the Brooklyn dance halls, “or do you want to take my pants off?”

“Oh, you _bastard,”_ Steve groans, because there’s no way he can say no to that. Somehow or other, he gets up, grabs Bucky around the waist, and pulls him toward the bed. If his legs aren’t working quite right and he ends up falling on top of Bucky, well, nobody has to know he didn’t plan it that way. Bucky is laughing as Steve makes short work of his boots and belt, but he’s certainly as eager as Steve is, undoing the buttons on his fly and tugging the pants down over his hips.

It’s been a long time since Steve has seen a dick that isn’t his own, but Bucky’s is exactly as perfect as he remembers. Not that he ever really got a good look in the old days. Whenever Bucky undressed in front of him, which was reasonably often given that they were always over at each other’s places, he had to make sure to look appropriately disinterested. But now, in full focus, Bucky is gorgeous, wide-eyed and rock-hard and eager, looking up at Steve with almost feverish desire but still waiting for him to take the lead. So Steve leans in, close enough for his lips to brush Bucky’s ear, and murmurs, “I want you inside me. And don’t you dare treat me like I’m fragile and I’ll break if you go too hard. I want you to fuck me like you’ve never fucked anybody before.”

“Thought you’d never ask,” Bucky says. Then he frowns. “Um, I didn’t bring anything to use for—”

“It’s okay.” Steve’s suitcase is open beside the bed; he reaches down, feels around in the pockets for a moment, and comes up with a little glass bottle. “I got it covered.”

Bucky gives a little huff of laughter. “Baby oil, Rogers? Really? Isn’t that usually for, y’know, babies?”

“Shut up. You don’t want to know how dry my skin gets in the winter.” Steve pours a little on his palm, then reaches out and takes hold of Bucky, who half-closes his eyes and lets out a low sound of pleasure. “Besides, I like the feel of it better than anything else I’ve tried.”

“You’ve done this often enough to have preferences?” Bucky says, his tone going a little dark.

Steve laughs. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous. You think I was sitting around pining over you for nine years?” he asks, even though, now that he thinks about it, that’s exactly what he was doing.

“What happened to waiting for the right partner?” Bucky asks, raising his hands to settle them on Steve’s hips, and yeah, he’s jealous, all right, and Steve, God help him, _loves_ it.

“Took me a couple times with the wrong partner to figure that out, I guess. But hey, at least I learned some stuff.” He demonstrates by sliding his oil-slicked hand up and over Bucky’s dick, stroking the sensitive spot under the head with his thumb, and Bucky shudders. “You forgive me?” he asks, brushing his lips over the soft skin of Bucky’s throat.

“Keep doing that and I’ll think about it,” Bucky says, ragged, breathless.

“No,” Steve says. “It’s my turn now.” He rolls over onto his back and bends his knees, planting his feet on the bed and offering himself up, and Bucky looks at him like it’s Christmas morning before he seizes Steve’s hip with his left hand and works one finger of his right hand inside him, then a second finger, and then— “Come on,” Steve growls, “I can take it,” and Bucky gives him a viciously delighted grin before he goes for it, entering him in one amazing long, slow slide.

Steve gasps and cries out, because sure, he knew it would be good, but did he say _perfect?_ That feels like a criminal understatement. It sounds like a cliche to say it’s like they’re made for each other, but he’s never had anybody just _fit_ with him like this. Bucky doesn’t forget what he said, either; when Steve says, “Harder,” he rocks his hips and thrusts all the way in, moaning when Steve locks his legs around Bucky’s waist as if he can pull him closer still. Steve rides the wave of pleasure all the way to the crest, to the moment where he and Bucky aren’t two people packed full of fears and problems anymore, they’re two halves of the same whole, and his body forgets to be sick and broken and says _yes_ instead of _no_ for once and he comes harder than he ever has in his life.

Bucky is only a matter of seconds behind him, and when he finishes, he collapses, rolling Steve over into his arms. He’s breathing hard, hair flopping in his eyes, looking destroyed in the best way. He gives a low sigh of contentment that turns into a laugh halfway through, and says, “I can’t believe you let me _do_ that.”

“I did a little more than let you,” Steve says, joining in with his own laugh. “Why are you surprised? I told you years ago that this was what I wanted.”

“Yeah, but I just… well, among other things, I thought you’d wanna be on top.”

“Maybe next time,” Steve says, leaning back and closing his eyes.

“There’s gonna be a next time?” Bucky lets out a sigh of complete contentment. “If I’m dreaming, don’t ever wake me up.” All the same, he pulls his right arm out from under Steve and moves as if he plans to get up, and Steve opens one eye and frowns.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Gonna clean up and go check on Tony real quick,” Bucky says, picking up a towel from beside the bathtub. “I’m supposed to be his bodyguard, you know. Besides, I need a cigarette after that, and I know it’d set off your asthma.”

“Oh,” Steve says. “But you’re coming back?”

“Yeah,” Bucky promises, grinning. “You just try and stop me.”

 

As soon as the door closes behind him in the hallway, the smile fades from Bucky’s face. Not because of Steve—what just happened with Steve was better than he ever dreamed, and on some level, he’s been dreaming about it for the last nine years—but because it had to happen right _now._ He guesses it’s par for the course for the mess that his life has been since Shelbyville, though: they’ve barely had a chance to get started and he’s lying to Steve already. He has no intention of checking on Tony. Clint’s on Tony duty at the moment, and anyway they’ve already badgered the poor guy into taking a sedative and going to bed, which means Bucky has more than done his job for the night. There’s something else he has to do.

Bucky figured out a while ago that while the metal hand certainly comes with drawbacks, it’s _aces_ for getting people to answer the damn door. He only bangs on the door of Peggy Carter’s hotel room for a couple of minutes before she cracks it open. Her makeup is off, and she’s wearing a reasonably modest dressing gown and scowling at him. “Barnes,” she begins, “do you have any idea what time—” And then she takes in his rumpled clothes, the flush that hasn’t quite left his skin yet, his more-than-usually-disastrous hair. “Well,” she says, eyes widening just a little. “I guess I don’t need to ask what you’ve been up to.”

“We need to talk,” Bucky says.

Peggy steps aside and lets him in, closing the door behind him. “All right,” she says, perching on the edge of the bed and patting the mattress beside her. “Let’s talk.”

He doesn’t sit down. Instead, he takes out his pack of cigarettes and says, “You mind?” When she shakes her head, he lights one with his dad’s old trench lighter—until tonight, he would’ve sworn that was the only stupid, sentimental thing he hung onto from a past he mostly wants to forget—and takes a long drag. That’s another thing he lied to Steve about: he knew he wouldn’t be able to hide it if he came back smelling like smoke, but the cigarette has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with calming his nerves, because he’s about to do something very, very dangerous.

“I want out,” he says.

Peggy looks back at him calmly. “That’s not really something either of us can arrange, is it, Mr. Barnes?”

“Then I’m changing my terms,” Bucky tells her. “When we get the Tesseract, I’ll go with you, and the rest of them get to take the _Avenger_ and go back to New York.”

“I thought we had a very specific deal.”

“That was before. I’ll get you the Tesseract; you find us some other boat to take us to the hammer.”

“And how do you plan to get Howard Stark to give up the prize he’s been hunting for thirty years?”

“I can be pretty convincing when I want to,” says Bucky. “And you have more than enough power to keep it once you’ve got it. Besides, what’s it really gonna add to drag the others along? Tony’s a genius who only gets smarter when he’s mad, and that makes him a loose cannon. Clint’s a carnie and a criminal, and Steve is way too stubborn to take orders if he doesn’t agree with your cause. They’d all end up being liabilities. Plus, you and I can move faster if it’s just the two of us. Let them go, or we’re through.”

“It’s interesting that you used the word _power,_ Mr. Barnes. Because I’m wondering exactly how much of it you think you have at the moment.”

Bucky closes his eyes and blows a stream of smoke from between slightly-parted lips. “What would you have done if I’d gotten shot today, Agent Carter?”

He carefully doesn’t look at her, but when she answers, her voice is cold. “You can’t expect me to believe you’d die just to spite me.”

“I wouldn’t have to. Plenty of ways I could put myself out of commission without killing myself, and then where would you be? And Tony wants to find his old man, sure, but he’s already conflicted about this whole thing. The minute one of his friends gets seriously hurt, he’s gonna decide this hunt isn’t worth it. I could blow this whole mission for you before you ever get near your precious Tesseract.” Bucky actually seriously doubts that’s the case. Tony’s got a temper on him; he doesn’t let it out often, but hurting one of his friends would be the one thing that would guarantee he’d never quit. But he’s gambling on Peggy not having a good read on how far Tony will go, as yet, and when she lets out an impatient sigh, he knows he’s won.

“Fine,” she says shortly. “Just you, then. After I have the Tesseract in hand, the others are free to go. But I hope you know there’ll be a price for this.”

“A price for, pardon my French, fucking with your bosses? Because, golly, the last time I ran into them, it just turned out—” Bucky raises his left hand in a resigned motion— _“So well._ Look, I gave my word that _I’d_ help you, and we both know I’m good for it. You’ve seen my service record; you know I don’t shy away from doing what needs done. Before the Army, I had big plans, and after, I just wanted a quiet, simple life, and if I never get either, then okay. I can live with that. But I won’t let you use my friends in your scheme. Especially not Steve Rogers.”

“Well, I hope you find him worth it.”

“He’s worth it,” Bucky says, and it’s true. Whatever it costs him, protecting Steve is worth it.

Peggy leans forward. “What is it that makes you willing to fight so hard for him?”

Bucky gives her a tense smile. “We’re not awful people, you and me and Tony and Clint,” he tells her. “We all have our principles, but we also know how to put them aside and do what we gotta do. The world needs that. If everybody was like Steve and just wouldn’t back down, wouldn’t compromise for anything or anybody, it’d be a mess. But it’s still true that the whole world could be pushing on Steve, telling him to get out of the way, stand aside, back down, and no matter what the cost was to him personally, he’d still be able to plant himself like a fuckin’ tree, look them in the eye, and say, ‘No, you move.’ Wouldn’t it be a hell of a thing, Agent Carter, to believe in _anything_ enough to do that?”

Peggy is quiet for just a heartbeat longer than she should be before she says, “You’re right about part of that, Mr. Barnes. You and I both know how to compromise.”

Bucky wishes that sounded a little less like a threat. Still, talking to Peggy is the second thing that’s gone better than he expected this evening, so he guesses he should quit pushing his luck. “Thanks for understanding,” he says, stubbing out the cigarette on his metal hand—he loves how much that rattles people—and heads back to Steve’s room.

It was kind of hilarious, how surprised Steve looked when he said he was coming back. Hell _yeah,_ he’s gonna crawl into bed next to his favorite person in the world tonight, and he hasn’t ruled out spending tomorrow morning there too. Tony won’t mind; he’s known for a while that Bucky goes queer more often than not these days, and after the requisite jokes about less competition for the ladies, he actually took a pretty progressive approach to it. Hell, he practically shoved him and Steve together earlier today. As much of a cynic as he pretends to be, Bucky can’t see Tony being anything but pleased by this development.

Bucky, on the other hand, knows he shouldn’t be as happy as he is about the way it turned out. He tried to stay away, he really did, because the last thing he wants is to cause Steve any pain, and now it’s going to be impossibly hard on Steve when he finds out the truth. But there’s something to be said for grabbing a little happiness where you can, when you can, and however much time he has left with Steve, Bucky doesn’t plan to waste a minute of it.


	7. Morocco

New York City is obviously the best city in the world, in Steve Rogers’ humble opinion, but he’s willing to admit that Tangier could be a pretty close second. He’s seen the paintings by Delacroix and Ernst and Matisse, but in person, it’s a hundred times more vivid. The sky is breathtakingly blue and the city is all bright splashes of color against white buildings; every flat surface seems to be painted with eye-dazzling patterns or covered in intricate mosaics, and the marketplace is full of the babble of half a dozen languages and the smells of coffee and spices, with the ancient Kasbah looming over everything. Every time he turns a corner, he wants to stop and stare at the carved arch of a doorway or a table holding a jumble of brightly glazed pottery, or listen to the unfamiliar music drifting out of a café. He could spend a year here and feel like he hasn’t seen enough.

Or maybe any new place is like that when you’re seeing it for the first time with somebody you’ve loved for most of your life, and you’re suddenly getting a chance to fall for them all over again.

Bucky is considerably less impressed than Steve, but he gets a kick out of Steve’s enthusiasm, even as he keeps grabbing him by the shoulder to tug him away from whatever he’s currently entranced by and propel him back along the path to the hotel. They’re both being careful not to actually hold hands—even in anything-goes Tangier, neither of them can quite bring themselves to break that taboo—but they’re finding any excuse to bump up against each other, for Bucky to throw an arm around Steve to steer him away from the mouth of an alley that’s a little too dark and deserted or for Steve to grab Bucky’s wrist and pull him toward a little courtyard where he’s spotted an exquisite stone fountain.

“Look, I love how excited you are about all this, but you gotta be careful,” Bucky finally tells him, pointing toward the one thing that would have instantly caught Steve’s eye just a few weeks ago: a group of Spanish soldiers moving slowly but purposefully through the medina. Technically Tangier is an international zone, but Steve, who follows the news maybe a little too obsessively, knows that Francisco Franco used the war as an excuse to occupy the city about the same time Bucky was hiding in a catacomb in Paris, and that Operation Torch came through this part of the world not long after. Things look peaceful here now, but the war still casts a hell of a long shadow.

“So tell me more about this guy we’re here to see,” he says, as he allows Bucky to steer him away from a stand selling pigeon pastillas and onto the Rue Dar Baroud.

“Max Eisenhardt,” Bucky says. “He’s an old buddy of Howard’s from the Great War. Moved his family here after Kristallnacht. As soon as I heard Howard was headed to Morocco, I knew who he had to be coming to see.”

Steve nods. He still hasn’t managed to translate that damn Viking inscription, but they’re making progress anyway. God bless Clint Barton, who did some old-fashioned legwork and learned that Howard booked passage on a ship that took him from Dublin to Lisbon, then Cadiz, then across the Strait. Steve is privately disappointed that they didn’t get to stop in Casablanca, but he’s keeping his mouth shut, because the fact that they were able to shave weeks off Howard’s lead on them is the first lucky break they’ve had.

And Tony seems like he could really use some luck right now. He barely left his cabin on the trip down the coast, leaving the steering to Clint and Bucky, and when he did come up on deck, he looked pale and tired. He brushed it off when both Steve and Peggy expressed concern, claiming he was just fighting off a cold, but if that’s true, then Steve will cook and eat Bucky’s ridiculous hat. Bucky himself goes into full loose-lips-sink-ships mode every time Steve brings up the subject, though: _he’s not going to keel over tomorrow, Stevie, that’s all you need to know_ is as much as he’ll say about it, and so far Steve has had to pretend to be content with that.

Tony does seem to be back to his usual wiseass self now, judging by the fuss he makes over his clothes before they head out to Eisenhardt’s nightclub. In honor of the occasion, he’s gone full Humphrey Bogart in a white dinner jacket. Steve has to admit, the man knows how to catch an eye. He clearly doesn’t think the same of Steve. “If I’d known that was the best you had, I would’ve gotten you some real evening wear,” he says, frowning.

Steve is wearing his best suit, and he knows it’s a good one because Pepper chose it; if it’s not on a level with Tony’s, well, it didn’t cost more than a junior professor’s annual salary, either. “I’m fine,” he says. “Nobody will be looking at me anyway.”

“Oh, I think we both know Barnes won’t be taking his baby blues off you all night,” Tony says, adjusting one of his cufflinks. “You know, he’s a hell of a lot more pleasant to have around since the two of you got friendly.”

Steve feels heat rising in his cheeks and quickly looks down. “Is he?”

“Yeah,” Tony says. “Makes me wonder if I ought to change my mind about having that word with the draft board, for his sake.”

Tony’s tone is perfectly neutral, and there’s no reason for Steve to flinch. It’s not as if he’s forgotten the War. How could he? It’s still got its hooks in all the people he’s come to care about these last few weeks—Peggy with her SSR bosses breathing down her neck, Clint and his finger-signs, Tony clearly still raw from his time in Hydra captivity, and Bucky, well... Bucky’s arm is obvious, but now that they’re spending every waking minute together, Steve is starting to see the more subtle effects of his time in the Army: the way he goes on the alert at every sharp noise, the way he sometimes mumbles his name, rank, and serial number in his sleep. And beyond them, there’s a whole tide of others still suffering: refugees flowing out of Axis territory and whispering about the horrible fates they fear for the ones left behind, tens of thousands of soldiers on the front lines, mothers and sisters and wives and children back home who live in dread of getting that fateful telegram. When this is done, will he still feel this compulsion to go and fight for them, even if he has to leave Bucky behind? He’s been trying to avoid thinking about the question, but part of him is afraid he already knows the answer.

“You know,” Tony says, just as Steve realizes he’s been quiet for far too long, “the clothes aren’t the only thing you could stand to improve. Maybe you should try growing a moustache.”

Steve snorts. “Yeah, ‘cause I’d look just like Cary Grant if I had a moustache.”

“Aim a little higher, Rogers,” Tony says, adjusting his bowtie. “Aim to look as good as me. You won’t make it, but you never get anywhere in life if you set yourself a low standard.”

“You two about ready?” Bucky asks from the doorway, and Steve looks up at him and almost falls off his chair.

If he’d been asked that morning, Steve would have said Bucky didn’t own a nice suit anymore—he seems to have lost all concern about his appearance about the time he lost his original left arm. Steve has gotten used to the sight of him with unkempt hair and a few days’ stubble, wearing his scruffy leather jacket and, of course, that ever-present hat. But tonight, Bucky has _cleaned up._ His dark blue pinstriped suit is carefully tailored and pressed, and he’s had a shave and a shoeshine; his hair is slicked it back, and Steve knows that if he moves closer he’ll smell Brylcreem, along with Old Spice and metal polish and just a hint of tobacco smoke. He looks years younger, and Tony’s right: he does look visibly happier. In fact, he looks almost unbearably like the boy Steve fell in love with half a world away and half a lifetime ago.

“What,” Bucky says, catching him staring, “I got something on my face?”

“See, I told you he’d like the new look, Barnes,” Clint says, elbowing past him, and then Steve gets to stare for a different reason. He starts to open his mouth, but Tony beats him to the punch.

“Iowa,” he says, slowly and clearly, signing each word as he speaks so there can be no misunderstanding, “what in the name of sanity is on your head?”

“It’s a fez,” Clint says. “And it looks _amazing._ Come on, Peggy said she’d meet us at the club. Let’s go.”

 

The club is busy but not crowded when they walk in, and although there’s a vastly greater mix of skin tones, the clientele is mostly the same mix of ordinary-looking couples and small groups in evening dress Steve would expect to see in a nightclub back in the States—mostly. On a second look, a few of the guests seem just a tiny bit more furtive than they ought to, and when Bucky steps forward, casually putting his body between Steve and a shady-looking bunch in the far corner, Steve knows he’s not the only one who’s spotted a few not-so-well-concealed guns under fancy dinner jackets. At the rear of the club, on a small raised platform, a pretty blonde is stretched across the top of a grand piano, singing “Stardust” while colored lights flicker over her white evening gown. Steve looks for the source of the lights, can’t find them, and knows that Tony will probably say he was out in the sun too long if he mentions it, so he chalks it up to some theatrical trick he hasn’t seen before and turns his attention to the matter at hand. “Do you see Eisenhardt?” he asks Tony.

“Give it a minute, Rogers. Half the point of coming to a place like this is to _be_ seen,” Tony says, pausing at the foot of the stairs and striking a faux-casual pose that might fool a stranger but doesn’t fool Steve at all. “Let Eisenhardt come to me.”

Which makes it all the more poetic, Steve guesses, when a woman in a brilliant scarlet evening gown walks up to Tony and slaps him across the face.

Either the lady really isn’t pulling her punches or Tony decides to deliberately ham it up, because he topples backward, crashing into a waiter with a tray of champagne glasses, and then there’s chaos for a minute or two while Bucky pulls Tony back to his feet and Tony makes a show of rubbing his jaw. “Always a pleasure to see you, Wanda,” he says.

“I wish I could say the same.” Wanda has dark hair and an East European accent, and besides the red dress, she wears opera-length gloves with the fingers cut off, the better to display an assortment of silver rings. “What are you doing here?”

“I can’t drop in to see the most beautiful woman in Morocco?”

“You’re a liar, and you’re obviously looking for my father, just like your father was a few months ago,” says Wanda, placated but unimpressed. “Hello, Clint,” she adds, turning her attention toward him, and her fingers flow in a complicated sequence of signs that go by too fast for Steve to follow. There’s something hypnotic about the way she moves her hands, and the stones in her rings flash red in the light from the gas lamps. Clint nods—Steve is amazed the fez doesn’t fall off—and replies in kind, and then Wanda turns to Bucky. “You I know, Mr. Barnes, but who’s this?”

“This is Steve Rogers,” Bucky says, moving a little closer to him. “He’s with me.”

“Ah,” says Wanda. She seems surprised but not shocked, which is a welcome change in Steve’s world. She holds out her hand to him and says, “Wanda Maximoff.”

“Maximoff,” Steve repeats. “Not Eisenhardt?”

“My father’s name isn’t safe anymore. Not for us here, or for him when he goes back to Europe to carry on his work there.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says. It’s _wrong,_ so many people living in fear, and a surge of the familiar helpless anger hits him: he should be doing something about it.

“Does that mean he’s back in Europe now?” Tony asks. “Don’t worry,” he adds, seeing her expression change, “I’m not going to ask for any details that might blow his cover. I’m just looking for my father, and all I want to know is what he said to your father when he was here.”

“We can tell you that,” says a voice so close to Steve that he starts; he didn’t know anyone was behind him. “And you can take what he left here, too, and be damned to it.”

“Pietro,” Wanda says softly, as Steve turns to face the fair-haired young man who’s appeared out of nowhere.

“Let the Starks handle Stark business,” says Pietro. “It’s too dangerous to keep it here.”

“It?” Tony says sharply. “What’s ‘it’?”

“Not here,” says Wanda. “Not now. Too many eyes. Come tomorrow, during the day, and we’ll talk.”

“And tonight, lose a lot of money at the roulette table,” Pietro says. “You can afford it.”

“Can I spend a lot on liquor instead?” Tony says, looking amused.

“You can afford both.”

“Fine,” says Tony. “Come on, boys. Drinks are on me.” He turns toward the bar, and Clint follows him.

As they pass, Steve elbows Clint in the ribs and holds out his hand. Clint glowers at him briefly, then hands over Pietro’s wallet. “You’re no fun,” he complains.

“Nope,” says Steve. “But someone has to be the moral compass around here.”

“See, the reason that’s funny is because...” Clint begins, but his words trail off as he stares at the club entrance. Everything falters, in fact—most of the conversations and even the notes of the piano stutter a little—and Steve turns toward the source of the commotion and doesn’t blame anyone one bit.

Peggy has just walked through the doorway and shrugged off a wrap to reveal a floor-length black evening dress, with a plunging neckline and sleeves made of black lace as fine as spider silk. The jewels on her earrings and necklace are rubies, real ones, Steve thinks; he’s no expert on gems, but he knows Peggy pretty well by now and is sure she wouldn’t be wearing them if they were made of paste. She hands the wrap to Pietro—how’d he get over there so fast?—and flashes a dazzling smile toward their little group, raising one hand and giving a little wave with her fingertips. A sort of collective sigh goes through the club as she descends the stairs and walks toward Tony, who’s taken up a position by the roulette table.

“Hey,” Bucky says in Steve’s ear. “This is our chance.”

“Chance for what?” Steve says, and then Bucky has grabbed his hand and pulled him out onto the dance floor.

“Hey, what—Buck, this is a _terrible_ idea!” Steve says.

“It’s a great idea,” Bucky says. He’s already got his metal hand resting at the base of Steve’s spine and his real one on Steve’s shoulder. “Sure, somebody might feel like they had to notice two guys like us out on the street, but it’s pretty unlikely in a private club, and with everybody looking at Peggy, there’s no way in hell anybody’s gonna give us grief. Which means I’m not gonna miss a chance to dance with my guy.”

“I don’t have the first idea how to dance!”

“You’ve never been dancing?” Bucky says, as if this personally offends him.

“Well, girls weren’t exactly lining up to dance with a guy they might step on, and the guys who’d take somebody like me home weren’t exactly looking for dance partners.”

“Stevie, you gotta stop selling yourself short,” Bucky says.

“I _am_ short. Jerk.”

Bucky huffs. “Look, just put your hands here and here, and then you just… follow my lead. See? You sort of sway… like this… okay, now turn… get in a little closer… Right, just like that.” He hums along with the band, and starts to sing along with the blonde on the piano: “‘Got my bag, got my reservation, spent each dime I’—ow! Jeez, you really aren’t good at this.”

“Well, putting your hand there is definitely not part of dancing, so I think stepping on your toes is letting you off pretty easy.”

“You know why you’re having such a hard time with this, Rogers?”

“Do tell,” Steve says dryly.

“Because you can never follow anybody else’s lead, that’s why. Always gotta be out in front, running straight into trouble. And you know what else?”

“What?” says Steve, ready to go on the defensive.

“I love you for it.”

If Bucky was looking to make it a sure thing that he’d get his toes mangled, that was a pretty good start. “Do you mean it?” he says.

“Stevie, I’ll lie about a lot of things, but never about loving you,” Bucky says, and then, as if he hasn’t just turned Steve’s entire world on its ear, he goes back to humming along to the music: “‘I’ll be waitin’ up for heaven, countin’ every mile of railroad track…’”

“Bucky,” says Steve. “What are we gonna do after this?”

“You mean back at the hotel? I got a few ideas.”

“No, I mean later than that. What’s it gonna look like, you and me being together back in our real lives?” he asks, and when Bucky gives him a strained little half-smile, he says, “What’s wrong?”

“Thinking about taking the train from Brooklyn into Manhattan every morning,” Bucky says, and before Steve can tell him to _give it a rest, Buck, I know when you’re lying,_ he asks, “What’s your apartment like? It’s weird that I don’t even know where you live now.”

“Uh,” Steve says. He’s suddenly fiercely glad Bucky doesn’t know he stayed in his ma’s place after she passed. Bucky wouldn’t judge him for being broke, but he _would_ call him out on staying in a building where the landlord wouldn’t even fix the busted windows, for no better reason than to torture himself with his ma’s memory. “Well, I gave up the lease, so it doesn’t matter. We’ll get a new place.”

“You thinking about the old neighborhood? I haven’t been back—guess I mostly follow Tony around these days. Is it still like it was down there?”

“If you mean is everybody still dirt poor and hungry, then yeah.”

“No, I mean is it like I remember? Is the automat still there on Fulton Street? Do you still go to the same theater where Frankie Dooley knocked your tooth out in the parking lot? I wanna be able to picture what it’ll be like when we’re there together.”

More and more, Steve is finding that he wants to picture it, too. Traveling is great, but he’s never wanted to live anywhere but Brooklyn, and he’s never wanted to live _with_ anyone but Bucky. There are even neighborhoods where the two of them could openly get a place together and hardly have to hide at all, maybe down near the queer bars on Middagh Street or close to the St. George Hotel. They could make a real life together, and all he has to do is take the draft deferment he’s already been given and stop fighting.

Yeah, that’s all he has to do.

Steve reaches up and runs his fingers through Bucky’s hair. It musses up his careful styling, but he looks better this way. “The first thing we’re gonna do is go to a Dodgers game,” he says. “I haven’t been since you left. Couldn’t stand to go without you. And the second thing…”

He talks to Bucky for a long time, and he doesn’t even realize the problem was that he was overthinking it, and that it was only when he stopped trying so hard that he started to get the hang of this dancing business. Instead, he keeps talking about the future that neither of them believes they’ll ever see, even though neither of them has ever wanted so desperately for something to come true.


	8. The Second Clue

The club that was magical after dark is bland and ordinary in daylight, with overturned chairs stacked on tables and the soft lighting replaced by prosaic gas lamps, but Wanda and Pietro are more intriguing in their street clothes than in evening wear. Wanda keeps the rings and heavy eye makeup, but her knee-length skirt and short coat are purely utilitarian; Pietro wears a suit that’s cut loose at the shoulders, a style Steve recognizes from some of the Kingpin’s men who expect to have to fight on occasion, and he doesn’t even pretend he’s trying to hide the brass knuckles in the pocket of his vest.

Tony, nursing a fierce hangover, is in no mood for small talk. “My father left something here, you said,” he begins, picking up last night’s conversation as if the intervening sixteen hours never happened. “Did you bring it?”

Wanda glances at Pietro, who nods and goes to fetch it from the club’s office. He’s back in seconds, carrying something long and wrapped in heavy cloth. When he unrolls it, he and Clint both audibly gasp—Clint, no doubt, because the thing’s handle looks like pure gold, with a large gem near the wickedly curved blade at the top; Steve because he recognizes this item from a hundred different works of art surrounding the Tesseract legend. “That’s Loki’s scepter,” he says. “Or… someone’s idea of it, anyway. Obviously the scepter is a myth, but—”

“You sure about that?” Bucky says quietly. “Lotta legends turning out to be true these days.”

“Pick it up,” Wanda says, and Clint is the one who obliges, reaching out to pick it up and immediately dropping it like it’s hot.

“Shit!” he says, and then, “Sorry, ladies, but… _shit._ That thing is _buzzing._ What is it, electrified?”

“Magic,” Wanda says, and if the thing wasn’t right there in front of Steve, he knows he’d laugh at how matter-of-fact she sounds. Oddly, though, nobody does. The bladed edge is the least of it; the thing just exudes malice. It’s no wonder Pietro wants to get rid of it as quickly as possible.

Tony seems to be the only one who’s unaffected. He picks up the staff—Steve sees Clint raise a hand to stop him, too late—and turns it over in his hands a few times. Then he stands, raises it with a flourish, and growls, “Raaah! I’m Loki, a character from a myth who never existed in the real world! Bow before my godly will! ...No, really, guys, why are you all looking at this thing like it’s about to blow? Rogers, time to earn your keep. Is this thing authentic Viking treasure or not?”

“It looks real,” Steve says. “I’d have to study it to be sure, but you don’t get a patina like that on new metal. You don’t feel anything when you touch it?”

“No.” Tony swings it, and everybody except Peggy leaps up from the table and takes a few steps back; Clint actually knocks over his chair. Peggy, of course, just leans out of the way, unruffled. “Okay, Iowa, everybody knows you don’t have the sense to be afraid of things that are actually terrifying, so if this thing is giving you the vapors, I’ll leave it alone. But if there is something wrong with it, it’s not bothering me. Hey, do you think it’s because I don’t have a soul? I usually get annoyed when people call me a soulless bastard, but maybe that has its advantages.”

“Don’t joke about things like that, Tony.” Steve tosses the cloth back over the scepter and rolls it up before he addresses Wanda: “So Howard Stark brought this thing to you. Did he say where he found it?”

“In a tomb,” says Wanda.

Steve glances at Bucky, who meets his eyes and nods. “I got a funny feeling like we just solved the mystery of the Viking’s missing weapon.”

“Must be. But why did Howard take it? Wanda, did he say anything else about it?”

“He said it was one of the keys,” Wanda begins, but she doesn’t get to finish telling them, because that’s when the front door of the club crashes open and a small, dark metal canister lands in the middle of the floor.

 

“Grenade!” Clint and Bucky shout in unison, but Steve has already figured that out. He’s starting to run toward it when Bucky grabs him by the shoulder and throws him backward. Clint kicks over a table and pulls Tony down behind it as Peggy joins them; Pietro is suddenly nowhere to be seen. Wanda is the only one who stands, unruffled, raising her hands, and maybe the weird lighting isn’t all turned off in the daytime, because Steve would swear he sees a red glow rising around the small black canister. Then Bucky shoves him down behind the table too, and there’s a _BANG!_ and an impossibly bright flash of light. He jerks away from Bucky and looks over the table, expecting the worst, but Wanda is already running back toward them, diving behind the tables herself. “It was just a noise and a light,” she says, and Clint and Bucky glance at each other grimly.

“A flashbang,” Peggy says, her voice just loud enough to carry over the ringing in Steve’s ears. “Just a glorified firework. Someone wants us blind, deaf, and maybe stunned, but not dead.”

“Well, I’ll be sure to express my appreciation!” Tony snaps.

“It means they don’t want to damage the goods, not that they won’t damage us!” Bucky yells. “Wanda, is this about your father?”

“No! Anyone who knows who he is knows he’s not here!”

“Then they want the scepter,” Peggy says. The bundle is on the floor, and she picks it up and thrusts it into Steve’s hands. “Rogers, get it out of here. Barnes, guard him.”

“The hell I will,” Steve says, a sentiment he seems to be expressing with increasing pointlessness lately, because Bucky is already dragging him toward the door. “Hey! We can’t leave them. Wanda—”

“Just stayed on her feet through a flashbang grenade, which tells me she’s more than meets the eye,” Bucky pants, as they burst through the back door of the club and into an alley. “And Clint laughs at loud noises _and_ he’s the best shot I know besides me, and Tony’s got his rocket suit in that briefcase he brought along. They’ll manage just fine without us.” He doesn’t bother to justify leaving Peggy behind; they both know he doesn’t need to.

By now they’re through the alley and out on a main street, in an open space full of stalls and shops. A young man on a motorcycle is stopped in front of a fruit stand, casually revving the engine and showing off for the young woman behind the stand; Bucky grabs him by the shoulder, says, “Sorry about this,” and throws a roundhouse punch at his chin, knocking him off the bike and pulling Steve onto it almost in the same motion. “Hold on,” he shouts, and takes off in a burst of gasoline fumes and burnt rubber.

“What the hell are you doing?” Steve shouts at him, even though between the explosion and the noise of the engine, he doubts Bucky will hear him. Clint might not be bothered by explosions, but the grenade was all too effective against him; he still has dark spots in his vision that flash bright when he closes his eyes, which he’s obliged to do about two seconds after Bucky takes off. The streets are just crowded enough to make this dangerous and reckless and stupid, and all of those things are acceptable, but he’s already learned the hard way that he gets motion-sick when there are sharp curves and a lot of jostling.

“Heading for the qanat,” Bucky calls over his shoulder. “We’ll lose them in the tunnels.”

“What the hell is a—” Steve is starting to ask, when the first gunshot zips past him.

“Jesus,” says Bucky, zigzagging the bike between two market stalls without taking his eyes off the road. “Who’s tailing us, Stevie? Can you get a look?”

Steve glances back, feeling his stomach lurch as Bucky rounds a corner. He’s never been so glad his art classes taught him how to memorize a lot in a glance. “Four, maybe five guys in a car—a Buick, I think. At least two rifles.”

“The guys, are they locals?”

“No. European. Well, blonde hair and light skin, anyway.”

“Fuck!” Bucky says, dodging a group of pedestrians, who don’t help anything by shrieking their own set of linguistically diverse curses after the bike before scattering out of the way of the car. “How the _fuck_ does Hydra keep getting ahead of us? Okay, hang on, this is gonna be rough.”

Steve would dearly love to make some kind of snarky comment that, but he’s too busy holding onto both Bucky and the staff, and praying the next gunshot doesn’t take off either of their heads. Bucky is steering them out of the busy part of town and into an outlying area where the streets are almost deserted, which is good for bystander safety and bad for the lack of obstacles between them and the car full of Hydra goons. Another bullet ricochets off his metal shoulder, and just when Steve thinks the next shot can’t possibly miss, Bucky veers off the street altogether, pointing the motorcycle at a low, dark opening in a hillside. “Duck,” Bucky shouts, and Steve does, as they blast through the opening and into a narrow stone tunnel.

Bucky called this a qanat, but what Steve sees, in the dim light from a set of skylights far above, is a massive structure, a labyrinth of stone tunnels and ramps that all seem to lead back to a huge central open space. That tunnel has to be fifty feet high, and at the bottom is a deep channel that water flows through in what seems to be a manmade underground river. The word that comes to his mind is _aqueduct,_ but this is a feat of engineering that would make the ancient Romans weep. And he sees why Bucky chose it. Even if a car would fit through the entrance, the ramps are too narrow for the axles. Not that they’re _comfortably_ wide enough for a motorcycle, either; Bucky takes one of the turns too sharply and scrapes the bike’s mirror against the tunnel wall, knocking it off in a crunch of breaking glass.

Bucky doesn’t slow down as they work their way deeper into the maze of passages. He veers the bike off into a side tunnel apparently at random, and Steve loses track of the route back to the surface long before the bike finally screeches to a halt. He pulls Steve off the seat and kicks the bike over the edge, where it crashes into one of the lower ramps as it falls, then hits bottom with a massive splash. “Are you okay? Tell me you’re not hit anywhere.”

“Not hit,” Steve manages, but that’s a far cry from okay, a fact that’s immediately confirmed when he goes down on his knees and vomits, noisily, over the ledge. He turns back to see Bucky’s mouth twitching, somewhere between dismay and hilarity.

“Wow,” he says, “it’s like Coney Island all over again.”

“You and I remember Coney Island very differently,” Steve mutters, and then Bucky grabs him and pulls him backward, into the deep shadows under a stone arch.

“Shh,” he says, making the sign for _listen,_ and Steve nods. He can hear them too: the pursuers have ditched the car and followed them into the tunnels on foot, calling out to each other in quiet tones. _Not German,_ Bucky signs, and gives Steve a questioning look. All Steve can do is shrug; the language feels familiar somehow, but he doesn’t recognize it either.

Bucky pulls the gun from his belt, thumbs the safety off, and takes aim at one of the upper ramps. When one of the pursuers comes into view, Bucky fires two shots in quick succession, making him shout and jump back. Then there’s a blast of answering gunfire, and Bucky jumps in front of Steve and raises his metal arm like a shield covering both of them, waiting for the shots to stop. He draws his second revolver and shoves it into Steve’s free hand, the one that isn’t holding the staff. “We’re too exposed here,” he says quietly into Steve’s ear. “When I say go, you run, _run,_ to the next tunnel. I’ll cover you, then when I make my move, you do the same for me.”

“I don’t even know how to aim this thing!”

“Yeah, but they don’t know that. When I say go, ready? Three—”

“Buck, this is—”

“—Two, one, _go!”_ Bucky shouts, and shoves Steve out onto the ramp, then whips around and empties his clip in the direction of the Hydra fighters.

Steve runs, because he has no choice, and dives into the next tunnel. The staff goes clattering onto the stones as he drops flat, just around a corner, and the cloth wrapping comes loose, revealing that wickedly curved blade and the bright blue gem. The thing still seems to drip with evil. Too bad he can’t use this thing against them—and then he thinks, _But what if I can?_

“Stevie, now,” Bucky shouts, and Steve tables that thought and raises the gun the way he saw Bucky do it, both hands on the grip and aiming, he hopes, at the place where he saw the last muzzle flash. His shots go wild, flaking stone chips off the ramp above the attackers, but Bucky makes it around the corner and slides in beside him, so it could’ve gone worse.

“Thanks,” Bucky says, taking the gun back from him. Then he grins. “Tomorrow, I’m gonna teach you how to actually hit things.”

“Great,” Steve says. “But right now, we’re gonna do this my way.”

“What do you—”

“Hey!” Steve shouts across the chasm. “You want the staff? Then stop shooting and let’s talk terms!”

“Steve, you _cannot give that thing to Hydra,”_ Bucky hisses.

“Of course not. But they don’t know that.” Raising his voice, he shouts again, “There are a couple ways this could go. We could keep shooting at each other, and you might wind up dead. Or you might hit one of us, but if you do, the other will throw the staff over the edge. You’d have to break cover to go after it, and my friend here is a hell of a good shot. _Or_ we could talk, and maybe nobody has to die today.”

There’s a moment of quiet while the pursuers talk it over, but at least nobody’s shooting at the moment. It gives Bucky time to say, “Fine, okay, you’re not awful at tactics, Rogers, but your personal judgment really needs some work.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that ten minutes ago you were running _toward_ a grenade, you moron! What the hell is wrong with you?”

Steve is opening his mouth to defend himself, although he has no earthly idea what he can say that will calm Bucky down, when the pursuers come to the end of their consultation. “Americans!” one of them, presumably the leader, calls across the gap. “Tell us what you want for the staff.”

“We’re not making any deals until you tell us what Hydra wants with it!”

“You should know,” the leader calls back. “You’re the one working with them.”

“What?” Steve says, aghast, and then, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but we would never—neither of us would ever work with Hydra, not for anything, _ever._ ”

Later, Bucky will tell him, not without admiration, that if anybody else had said it, it would’ve sounded fake and unconvincing, “but you, Stevie, you had ‘mortally offended’ down to a _science._ Maybe they only talked to you for two seconds, but that was long enough for them to know you weren’t lying.” Steve himself doesn’t believe it was quite _that_ easy, but he can’t argue with what happens next: after a very long silence, the one who spoke to him—the one Steve has mentally flagged as the leader—tosses his gun out of the recess he’s hiding in, landing it neatly on the ramp. “All right, American,” he says, standing up, hands in the air. “Let’s talk.”

Steve hands the pistol back to Bucky, giving him a look that means, _cover me._ Bucky shakes his head and makes a small despairing noise, as if he can’t believe he’s mixed up with someone this obviously insane, but he trains the gun on the enemy leader as Steve steps forward, hands raised in the same gesture of peace. “Who are you?” he says.

“The Sons of Mjolnir,” the enemy leader says, and suddenly it all clicks in Steve’s head. Of course: if all the legends are turning out to be true, then there’s one group that wants the Tesseract more than Howard Stark, more than the SSR, more even than Hydra. “We have guarded the tools of the gods for over five thousand years. And who are you to steal them?”

“Me?” Steve shakes his head. “Nobody. I’m just a kid from Brooklyn. And I don’t want to steal anything. All I want is to find Howard Stark and bring him home. Now, tell us what you meant about working with Hydra, because either you’re wrong, or we have a serious problem.”

The leader of the Sons of Mjolnir is still opening his mouth to answer when the bullet goes through his brain.

Everything seems to happen in slow motion after that. Steve hears himself shout, “No!” as the man falls. Bucky grabs him and shoves him around the corner as two more shots ring out, then grabs his hand and starts to run, pulling him deeper into the tunnels. It takes a minute before he has the presence of mind to plant his feet and pull back against Bucky, and longer than that before Bucky realizes Steve is crazy enough to try to stop him. “We have to go back,” he says, “we have to help them—”

“They’re dead, Steve! And we’ll be dead too if we don’t move!”

Steve sees the sense in that. They have to get back to the others to tell them—what, exactly? That they have a Hydra mole in their midst? No, that can’t be true. Tony has no reason to lie about his goals for this expedition—he has enough money and connections that if he was working for Hydra, he’d have a whole Hydra team; Peggy is part of the SSR, which exists at least partly to _fight_ Hydra; and it’s simply impossible to believe Clint is that duplicitous. He’s just met Pietro and Wanda, but Hydra was after them before that, in Ireland—

 _Or were they?_ he suddenly wonders. The man who came after them in the cave—he never actually said he was Hydra, did he? Bucky was the one who said that. Just like Bucky was the one who said Hydra was after them today. And it was Bucky who asked him to keep the inscription from the Viking tomb to himself, Bucky who—

 _No,_ Steve thinks. No, if someone is selling them out, it isn’t Bucky. He won’t allow himself to consider that possibility.

The qanat really is a maze of twisting, turning passages, but somehow or other, Bucky keeps them moving steadily uphill, and eventually they come out at another entrance, one that has to be a good mile from where they went in. Steve resigns himself to a long walk back to the Maximoffs’ club. Which reminds him: “I can’t believe you stole that poor kid’s motorcycle, Buck.”

“It wasn’t stealing, it was borrowing,” Bucky says, unruffled. “Had _every_ intention of returning it. It’s Hydra’s fault it got destroyed, seeing as they had every option to stop shooting at us.”

“That wasn’t Hydra, it was the Sons of the Mjolnir.”

“Sure, and what are they, exactly?”

“A Thor cult,” Steve says. “Supposedly, what happened was that Thor was banished from Asgard, and Odin charged a group of Vikings with protecting Mjolnir—Thor’s hammer—until Thor was worthy of it again.”

“Like Grail knights?”

“Kind of, except they weren’t looking for the hammer, they were protecting it. Hiding it. The Tesseract was supposed to help with that, only supposedly Loki got involved and… well, long story short, it was lost, and that’s why everybody up to and including Howard Stark has been looking for it for a few thousand years. Most of the scholars don’t believe the Sons ever existed, figured some Viking tribe added that idea later to give themselves a bigger role in the story. Only I guess they’ve been a real thing all along, which means we haven’t been fighting Hydra. We’ve been fighting the good guys.”

“If they’re shooting at you, they’re bad, Steve.”

“Still better than Nazis,” Steve says darkly. “Bucky, what he said—you don’t think—”

“What, that one of us is accidentally working for Hydra? No, of course I don’t believe that. I think these Sons of Mewmew—”

_“Mjolnir—”_

“—were just trying to get inside your head to get you to turn over the magic scepter—” Bucky pauses. “I can’t believe those words just came out of my mouth. Either way, we definitely can’t let anyone else get their hands on it now.”

Steve is about to answer when a car zooms up to them. Once again, Bucky instinctively shoves Steve behind him and raises the gun, but there’s no threat: it’s Peggy, looking urgent as she throws the door open. “Barnes,” she says, “we have to hurry. It’s Tony.”

 

The fires are out by the time they get back to the Maximoffs’ club, but that’s about the best thing Steve can find to say about the scene. He doesn’t know if he’d go so far as to say the building is unsalvageable, but a large section of it has been reduced to a blackened shell. At least everyone got out before the place burned; the twins even seem to have saved most of their important possessions, judging from the pile stacked at Pietro’s feet. Uniformed men who Steve assumes are the local police wander around, taking statements, but they don’t seem very hurried, or very concerned. The people who do seem frantic are Clint, who’s trying to make a knot of bystanders move and make room for the car to come through, and Wanda, who’s kneeling over a very still body strapped to a rocket suit.

Bucky doesn’t wait for the car to stop before he vaults over the door and runs, dropping to his knees beside Tony. “The lights on the suit went out and he fell, right?” he asks Wanda, and when she nods, he says, “Aw, Tony,” which is somehow worse than his usual fits of swearing. He rips open Tony’s jacket, and the shirt underneath it, and if Steve thought he was done with surprises for today, well, he was wrong again.

There’s a hole in Tony’s chest, a palm-sized opening with a round metal casing implanted in it. Inside the circle is a ring that looks similar to the one in Bucky’s arm, the thing he calls the arc reactor, although Tony’s is white and dull instead of glowing and red. Bucky strips off his own jacket and shirt. “Steve, help me,” he orders, then reaches up with his right hand to pop the arc reactor out of his prosthetic arm, which immediately goes dead.

Steve kneels in the dirt beside Bucky, putting a hand on Tony’s shoulder. He’s breathing, but just barely. Take the old reactor out and put mine in,” Bucky tells him. “All you gotta do is give it a quarter-turn, but don’t pull the—Jesus Christ, Rogers!” he says, as Steve holds up a fist-sized mechanical device attached to a set of dangling wires. “Okay, it’s okay, we can work with this. Pull _that_ part out and put _this_ part in and then reach in there and plug it back into the socket.”

Steve reaches into the opening and pushes the plug into its socket, then snaps the metal ring, now holding the glowing red arc reactor, back into its housing. As soon as that’s done, Tony gasps a deep lungful of air and opens his eyes. He lies there for a few seconds, taking in the worried faces above him. “What the hell just happened?” he asks, and then, with a smirk that kind of makes Steve want to punch him, he adds, “Tell me Carter kissed me.”

“I’ll tell you what happened: you almost died, you arrogant son of a bitch!” Bucky shouts at him. Steve recognizes this situation all too well: now that the crisis is past, he can let himself be scared and angry. He jumps up and starts pacing, muttering, “Two guys on this trip with heart conditions, and one of them wants to jump on grenades and the other wants to fly around with an airplane engine on his back and a glorified lightbulb in his chest, miracle _my_ heart doesn’t give out the way this is going, so help me when Barton starts to look like the sane one—”

Experience has taught Steve that when Bucky’s like this, it’s best to let him wind down a little before trying to intervene. “What did just happen?” he asks Peggy instead.

“You asked about Stark’s war wound,” she says. “Now you’ve seen it. He’s got a handful of shrapnel near his heart that can’t be removed, and that arc reactor is keeping him alive. It’s also a secondary power source for the rocket pack—a failsafe to keep him from falling out of the sky. The problem is, sometimes the rocket pack draws a little too much power away from his heart.”

“So the strategy behind his design is ‘stay in the sky now, and deal with the problem of your heart stopping later’?” Steve says, aghast. “He shouldn’t be up in the air without a backup plan. No, better yet, he shouldn’t be flying at all. He—”

“He shouldn’t try to push his body beyond what it can handle?”

When Peggy’s voice gets very mild like that, Steve knows it’s a good time to cut his conversational losses. “I had no idea,” he says instead, and then, “Does his father know?”

“I imagine it would be a hard thing to keep from him. Why?”

“Because if he does, it’s no wonder he wants the Tesseract so much,” Steve says. “If it really is what the stories say, a source of energy that never burns out, then it could save Tony’s life. ...Why is that funny?”

“It isn’t,” Peggy says, hiding her smile. “What’s funny is that you figured it out that quickly and Tony still has no idea.” Raising her voice, she adds, “I think we’d better get your employer to the hospital, don’t you, Mr. Barton?”

“Okay, under absolutely no circumstances am I going to the hospital,” says Tony.

 

“I’ve never seen anybody with only one functioning arm throw somebody into a car before,” Steve tells Clint, five minutes later. “Not that Tony didn’t deserve it. I’ve never met a man as stubborn as Tony Stark in my life.”

“According to Barnes, Tony’s a delight compared to you when you’re sick.”

“Oh, come on, I’m not that bad,” says Steve.

“I’m just telling you what he said. Don’t shoot the messenger.” Clint turns back and looks at the charred remains of the nightclub. “This is a hell of a thing. Those poor kids.”

“We’ll be all right,” Wanda says, behind him. “It’s not as if it’s the first time we’ve had to start over.”

“Not even the first time it was because of the Starks,” Pietro mutters. It’s eerie how he always seems to show up out of nowhere, and Steve never hears him coming.

“How many times have you had to start over?” Steve asks.

“If you asked our father,” Pietro says wryly, “he’d tell you Eisenhardts have been starting over since we left the Promised Land. But the two of us? We were too young to remember when we left Germany. Then there was Poland, then Sokovia, and now here.”

“What about your father?” Steve says. “When will he be back? Can you get word to him about what happened here?”

Both of them look at him as if he’s lost his mind, and Pietro says, “You don’t know?”

“Our father works with resistance cells all over Europe,” Wanda says, and Steve recognizes the careful lack of expression on her face, the flatness of her voice. “He knows every possible way to cross enemy lines. Since he hasn’t come back, the chances are good he’s already been captured and been sent to one of the camps.”

Steve sets his jaw. Yeah, even back in the States, he heard rumors about those camps. “Well, you don’t have to start over alone this time,” he says. “If you want, I can talk to Tony about helping you come to America. He knows a lot of politicians; I’m sure he can swing two sets of immigration papers. I can’t promise you’d be safe, but you’d be safer. And you’d have help. I can’t do much, but I’ll do anything I can.”

Wanda looks up and meets Steve’s eyes, holding his gaze for what feels like a long time. It can’t be more than a few seconds, really, but he has the uncomfortable feeling that she’s staring into his soul. He tells himself to stop being fanciful, and eventually she drops her gaze and her expression softens. “Tony’s father offered to help us emigrate once, before,” she says. “We said no then, but now… We’d have to think about it. But thank you for wanting to help.”

“I wish I could do more,” Steve says, very quietly.

“I think you have a different job to do,” Wanda says. “You wanted to know why Howard Stark brought the scepter here. May I?”

Steve hands it to her, wishing he didn’t feel so relieved to hand it off. His gut says that not only is it his responsibility, but that the safest hands to hold it are his own. She unwraps it, and if she’s bothered by the feel of it, like everyone else was, she doesn’t show it; she just reaches for his hand, and places it on the handle, beneath her own. Then she closes her eyes, and he does the same.

He draws in a sharp breath as a flood of images starts to fill his head. It’s a battle, but it’s nothing like anything he’s ever seen in a film or a newsreel. Half of the combatants are Vikings; the other half are… well, whatever they are, they’re clearly not human. _Frost giants,_ he thinks, although he doesn’t know whether that’s his own guess or the scepter itself filling in the gaps. More warriors arrive, far stronger and taller and better armored than the humans: Asgardians, obviously. The battle ends, but a fresh argument breaks out between two of the Asgardians: one can only be Odin the Allfather, always denoted by his eyepatch and ravens, and a long-haired, burly man who must be Thor, wielding a strange, block-shaped warhammer. Steve sees Odin rip the hammer away from his son, and watches it fall from an unfathomable height and strike the earth, leaving a crater where it lands; he sees the scepter given to one of the Asgardians for safekeeping, and sees that one board the same Viking ship he saw in the cave in Ireland; he sees the first of the Sons of Mjolnir given a glowing cube that can only be the Tesseract, and watches that one vow to keep it hidden until its hour of need. He still couldn’t say how he knows what he’s seeing, but see it he definitely does. And the scepter shows him something else, as well: another church, with one wall taken up by an immense wooden carving that Christian visitors probably see as the Tree of Knowledge and the others, like the Sons of Mjolnir, probably see as Yggdrasil, the world tree.

“Steve,” Wanda says, and he opens his eyes, with a sense of coming back to himself from somewhere very far away.

“Howard Stark didn’t come here for your father’s help,” he says, making it more statement than question. “He came for yours.”

Wanda nods. “Sometimes I don’t even know how I do what I do,” she says, “but it’s easier with something this old. Or maybe I should say, with something this powerful. It wanted those pictures to be seen.”

“Did it show Howard the same thing you showed me?”

“I think so.” She gives the scepter a look that tells him she doesn’t trust it, which seems wise. “Mostly, anyhow.”

“Then I know where we have to go next,” says Steve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The qanat in this chapter is inspired by [the Kariz-e-Kish](http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/kariz-e-kish). I know that's not exactly in the right part of the world, but qanats were apparently used [all over the place](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat#Qanats_by_country) and are super cool.


	9. Norway

Now that they have a destination, Tony chafes at every second he’s “wasting” in the hospital recovering from his near-miss, and he addresses his boredom in true Stark fashion: by designing and building an airplane. Steve is initially worried about sabotage: neither he nor Bucky has raised the spectre of a Hydra mole to the rest of the group—Bucky still insists that the “Viking assholes,” as he’s taken to calling them, were lying about that to make trouble, and Steve can’t prove otherwise, so he keeps his concerns to himself. Fortunately, Tony isn’t taking any chances; the plans he’s drawn up are so closely guarded that even Steve hasn’t seen them, and he pays the local mechanics, engineers, and guards he hires well enough that they don’t have to worry about either Hydra or the Sons of Mjolnir bribing the workers, so neither of them feels any need to argue with Tony about that.

The argument starts over the suggestion that Tony should hire a pilot.

“I don’t care how fine you think you feel,” Bucky shouts, across the breakfast tray he’s carried up to Tony’s hotel room. “You’re not even supposed to be out of bed yet, much less piloting a plane, and I’m not letting you take us ten thousand feet in the air with nobody else who can fly this whatever-it-is you’re building.”

“You’re overreacting,” Tony says. “Rogers, tell Nurse Barnes that he’s overreacting.”

“Don’t say ‘nurse’ like it’s an insult,” Steve says, without looking up from his book. He could have told Tony that he was doomed from the moment Bucky walked in and found him out of bed and trying to work, but frankly, it’s so nice to see someone else on the receiving end of Bucky’s mother-hen act that he’s keeping his mouth shut. “He’s right. On the boat, someone else could take over if you passed out. You need a second pilot.”

“I don’t need a second pilot.”

“Saying the same thing louder isn’t the same as making an argument, Tony.”

“Here’s an argument for you,” Bucky says. “If you don’t let me hire somebody, I’ll send a wire to Pepper and tell her everything you’ve been up to.”

“That’s dirty pool, James,” Tony says, with a look of real horror. When Bucky crosses his arms and glares, Tony sighs. “Fine, get me a pilot.” After Bucky leaves, slamming the door behind him, he asks, “Has he always been like that, Rogers?”

“You got off easy,” Steve says. “He used to sit on me. And not in the fun way.”

Tony just groans and goes back to the design he’s calling Mark II, a new flight suit with no less than two backup arc reactors for the rocket pack.

Bucky must have been stewing over the pilot situation for a while, judging by how quickly he comes back with a candidate. “This is Sam Wilson,” he announces. “He flew with the 99th Pursuit Squadron. Word is, he’s the best pilot in North Africa. And just so we’re all clear on this, he _assures_ me that the first person to say ‘play it again, Sam’ gets a punch in the face.”

“You were with the Tuskegee Airmen?” Steve asks, and Sam raises an eyebrow.

“You’ve heard of us?”

“Anybody who hasn’t, will,” Steve says, with certainty.

Tony finally deigns to look up from his blueprints, and Steve is pleasantly surprised when he doesn’t feel a need to comment on Sam’s race. Then he feels bad about being surprised, because of all people, he should know that Tony cares about exactly one thing in his employees: whether they can do their jobs. “What did you fly?” he asks.

“Officially, the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk,” Sam tells him. “Unofficially, I haven’t met a bird yet that I couldn’t get in the air.”

“So if the Army had you flying a Red Tail,” Tony says, “how’d you wind up in Tangier?”

“My unit came through Morocco on deployment to Libya,” Sam says. “They reassigned us to the Mediterranean last year. My copilot and I got shot down over Pantelleria. He didn’t make it. I did, but I got injured in the crash. I can still fly, but the Army says I can’t fight. And back home, I already had to work twice as hard to be considered half as good as any white man. I knew if I went back, they’d never let me fly again. So I came here to work, save up some money, maybe buy my own plane one day.”

“You want to get back in the sky that bad, huh?” Tony gives him a long, measuring look, then beckons him over to the desk. “You ever thought about flying something besides a plane?” he asks, tapping one of the blueprints, and Steve glances at Bucky just in time to see his _what have I done_ expression. The page shows a design that looks a lot like the rocket suit, only now, besides the helmet, it’s also got wings.

 _Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,_ Clint signs, but everybody ignores him.

 

“Norway,” Steve says, pointing to the map. “In the legends, this spot right here is where the Asgardians came to Earth—Midgard—to help the Vikings in a battle against the Frost Giants. There’s a church there with some of the oldest surviving Urnes-style wood carvings, and what’s really interesting is that when you compare them to Celtic art from the same era, you can see amazing similarities in the—” He stops. “Nobody cares, do they?”

“I care,” Bucky says, with more loyalty than conviction.

“All art before Picasso was crap,” says Tony, then pauses, dramatically. When Steve grits his teeth and doesn’t take the bait, he reluctantly continues, “So that’s where Dad’s headed, huh?”

“Well, since he didn’t write his dissertation on this _crap,_ it might take him a little longer to figure out—”

“Boys,” says Peggy. “Be nice. You’re acting like you’re about seventeen years old.”

It takes every ounce of Steve’s willpower not to say, _he started it._ “—But yeah, if Howard followed his usual pattern and found an expert, it won’t take him long to figure out that he needs to go to Tønsberg. If we head straight there, we might actually catch up to him. That is, if your plane can actually get off the ground,” he addresses Tony, because two can play at this game.

“I think my plane will _do,_ Rogers,” Tony says heatedly, before he realizes his own trick has just been turned around on him and gives Steve a look of grudging respect. “In fact,” he says, “why don’t you come take a look?”

Steve’s been wondering how long it was going to take Tony to reach the point where his desire to perfect his creation is eclipsed by his desire to show it off, and evidently this is it. “Behold,” he says grandly when they reach the hangar, flipping on the bank of electric lights.

If Tony is expecting Steve to _ooh_ and _ahh_ over his creation, he’s in for a disappointment. To Steve, it just looks like an airplane. A big airplane, sure, a sleek silver beast of a machine, but still an airplane. It’s Sam who stares at it, then walks up to it reverently for a closer look. “Are those turbojet engines?” he says, in the tones of someone who’s heard of such a thing but never expected to see one in person.

“Five of ’em,” Tony says, smug. “You wanted redundancy, Barnes? You’d have to shoot out four engines to bring this beauty down. I’m calling her the quintuple-jet.”

 _“I’m_ calling it the ‘Tony is compensating for something,’” Clint says, possibly a little louder than he means to.

“Don’t forget who pays the bills, Iowa,” Tony says, but without any real rancor. Nothing restores his good humor like having built something.

After Sam takes the jet up for a test flight and surprisingly few pieces fall off, Tony declares his intention to leave for Norway as soon as possible. Bucky grabs Steve’s hand as the others are grouping up to go back to the hotel. “Hey,” he says, “it’s our last night here. Let’s make it count.”

“What’d you have in mind?” Steve asks.

 

Bucky borrows a car from somewhere and drives them outside the city to a place called the Cave of Hercules, a name that makes Steve smile when he hears it. When Bucky asks what’s so funny, he says, “You know Hercules was the guy who killed the original hydra, right?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “He burned it, as I recall, which doesn’t sound like the worst idea for the modern Hydra, either. That’s not why we’re here, though.”

“Why are we here, then?” Steve asks, but Bucky just drives on past the sign for the caves and finally turns the car down a deserted path, parking at the top of a low cliff overlooking the ocean. He spreads a blanket on the ground next to the car and brings out a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses he’s tucked in the backseat. He pours a glass for each of them, then holds his up. “Here’s to the little guy who’s too dumb to run away from a fight,” he says, “and the even dumber guy who keeps following him.”

Steve clinks his glass against Bucky’s. “To us,” he says. “Till the end of the line.”

Tangier, it turns out, has pretty spectacular sunsets. Steve is going to paint this one someday, if he gets a chance. Neither of them says much while they watch it; it’s enough to sit with their arms around each other. Bucky’s skin is warm against his, a perfect counterpoint to the cool breeze coming off the water. “Buck,” he finally says, when it’s almost full dark, “not that I’m complaining, but why’d you bring me here?”

“It’s our last night in Tangier,” Bucky says again, and if there’s a little hitch in his voice before “in Tangier,” Steve doesn’t think anything of it. “I want it to be something we can always remember.”

“We’ll always have Paris,” Steve says.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, quietly.

“Buck,” Steve says, “the war’s not gonna last forever. If I go—when I go—someday it’s gonna be over, and then we’ll be together for good. We found each other once when we didn’t even know we were looking; we’ll do it again.”

“I hope to God you’re right,” Bucky says, like it’s a prayer. Then he leans close and kisses Steve, soft and slow, and Steve feels as invincible as Hercules himself, ready to walk up and knock on Hydra’s front door, ready to take on anything.

 

Tønsberg, Norway might once have been the site of a battle the Vikings took as a precursor to Ragnarok, but now it’s a small city of narrow, winding cobblestone streets, full of little red and blue and brown wooden buildings that crowd right up to the edge of the Oslofjord. “Stupid magic rock couldn’t be in London,” Tony grumbles. “Couldn’t be in Paris, couldn’t even be in Copenhagen or something, nooo, had to be another gorgeous little town in the middle of nowhere,” and then he adds, _“Charming,”_ like it’s an epithet.

“They were thinking about the fate of the world, Tony, not about your aesthetic opinions,” Steve tells him, but that just earns him a glare and some muttering.

“Does this feel a little weird to anyone else?” Sam asks, as they get out of the car and approach the old stone chapel—all of them except Clint, who made the mistake of trying to match Tony drink for drink last night and is consequently sleeping off a hangover on the floor of the quin-jet. Sam was granted full membership in this little group of idiots after doing some stupidly dangerous loops in the quin-jet on his second test flight.

“What?” Peggy asks, adjusting her grip on the staff slightly. She was unwilling to leave it on the plane with only Clint to guard it, so she’s carrying it with her like a walking stick.

“What I mean is,” Sam says, “if we find this thing, what we’re doing amounts to stealing from a church.”

“Listen, if the Tesseract does what the stories say, then we’re looking at an energy source that could power all of New York City for decades,” Tony says. “Maybe all of the country. Think of the good that could do.”

“Just finding the Tesseract would be enough for me,” Steve says. “We can’t keep it. It belongs to the people of Norway, if it belongs to anybody. Anyway, I thought you weren’t interested in finding it at all. Thought you wanted to find—”

He stops as they cross the threshold and see the man sitting in the church, turned toward the door with one arm slung casually over the back of a pew. He looks incredibly like Tony, if you aged him twenty years: same dark hair, same sharply intelligent eyes, same sardonic smile. Even if Steve didn’t recognize him from the papers, he’d know this man is Tony’s father.

 

“You son of a bitch,” Tony says.

“Language,” Steve and Bucky say in unison. Bucky’s probably joking, but Steve isn’t: they’re in a church, for God’s sake.

“Took you long enough,” Howard Stark says, and Steve reaches out and grabs Tony’s arm. Tony is giving his father the same look that Sarah Rogers used to give Steve every time he turned up bleeding, or limping and leaning on Bucky for support, or cradling a dislocated joint: first she’d hold her panic in check just long enough to make sure he was stable, and then the story of the latest fight would come out, and she’d hit him with the glare that meant, _I’m so glad you’re alive that I just might murder you for being an idiot._

“You disappear on me,” Tony growls, “you vanish without a word and leave Obie Stane in charge back home—he’s stealing from you, by the way, and he knows I know it, but I can’t do anything because it’s _your_ company—and then you mail me your _stupid_ journal of _stupid_ breadcrumb clues so I have to spend months chasing across the world to find you, and you sit there like a smug old bastard saying it _took_ me long enough?”

“Tony,” Peggy says, taking a step forward and laying a hand on his other arm.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I did,” says Howard, standing up and coming toward them. “You want to know why? I knew I was getting close to the Tesseract when Hydra started breathing down my neck. I spent months throwing them off my trail. Wouldn’t have done much good if I’d written you a letter that said ‘meet me in Norway’ and they’d read it and gotten here first, would it? I sent you the journal because I knew they wouldn’t figure it out, but you would. Not to mention that the only way to get you to get off your ass for any reason is to make it a challenge.”

 _“Gentlemen,”_ Peggy says, more forcefully this time. “We came here to do a job, and I suggest we do it. Mr. Stark, judging by the fact that you’re still here, I assume you haven’t found what you came for.”

Howard’s eyes do a quick sweep up and down Peggy’s body. When Tony growls, _“Do not,"_ low, under his breath, Howard shoots him a look that says he’ll expect full introductions later, but he only says, “I hate to disappoint a lady, but it’s not as simple as walking in here and looking for a marquee sign that says ‘this way to the secret ancient artifact.’”

“So you need some _help,”_ Tony says. His tone implies that he’s reopening a longstanding family quarrel.

“You may be a grown-up genius now, but I’m still your father, young man, and there’s no need to be an ass.”

“Ever heard the saying ‘like father, like son,’ Dad?”

“Where have you looked already?” Steve interrupts, putting his body directly between them.

“Thank you,” Howard says, “finally, someone who can stay on task. Howard Stark,” he says, holding out a hand to Steve.

“Steve Rogers,” Steve says, shaking it.

“Rogers! I read your dissertation. Your research was impeccable,” Howard says, delighted. He glances at Tony and adds, “Well, at least you did something right by bringing this one along.” If looks could kill, Howard’s flesh would be melting off his bones, but Tony just grinds his teeth. “My first thought was that it would be in the Viking tomb, like the staff was,” Howard goes on, nodding toward a sculpted sarcophagus in the center of the church. “But—”

“But the Sons of Mjolnir wouldn’t have buried it,” Steve says. “They believe they’re guarding it for Odin, which means they’d want it someplace readily accessible if and when he came back for it.”

He crosses the church and stands in front of the wall with the wooden carving of Yggdrasil, the one he saw in the… vision?... that Wanda showed him. The carving is an amazing thing from a technical standpoint, made up of precisely matched interlocking panels with every root and leaf of the tree precisely defined; it must’ve taken a team of craftsmen years, if not decades, to carve it and polish it and piece it together. It’s the symbolism he’s looking at now, though. There’s one element in the design that’s never made sense to Steve: the snake wound through the tree roots in a bottom corner of the wall. The general scholarly wisdom is that it symbolizes corruption at the heart of Asgard, but Steve didn’t really buy it then and it makes even less sense now, with the context that the Sons of Mjolnir think they’re saving the world by guarding something hidden in this church. What would make sense would be if the snake was the one from a different legend, the one where Loki was imprisoned and Odin set a guard over his dangerous son, a guard that happened to be a serpent. If the same thing is true in this case, and the panel guards another thing that Odin would have considered both precious and deadly...

The hidden panel blends in seamlessly with the ones around it, which means that Steve pokes and prods at the carving for a good ninety seconds. He’s dimly aware of Tony saying something impatient, and Bucky telling him to shut up, before he finds the switch, which is hidden in the snake’s eye.

A blue glow rises out of the box as he slides it out of the wall and turns, holding it as carefully as the priests of his childhood held the communion cup at Mass. It’s exactly and unnervingly like the legends say: a blue square, maybe four inches to a side, that looks like glass or crystal but radiates light from the inside, bright enough to paint everything Steve can see with a blue glow. It’s not only light under the surface, but a swirl, like a cloud of trapped gas… or, Steve thinks, like a tiny galaxy of spinning stars, somehow shrunk down small enough to fit in the palm of his hand.

“Fuck,” Bucky says, very softly, into the sudden, awestruck silence.

Steve shakes his head. Oddly, he isn’t having any trouble believing that he’s looking at the Tesseract—the actual Tesseract, the jewel of Odin’s treasure room. After the last few weeks, he guesses his bar for belief has been permanently reset. All the same, in what ought to be the most triumphant moment of his life, something is nagging at him. “This isn’t right,” he says. “It was too easy. No one’s guarding it.”

“So?” says Tony. “Wasn’t the whole point of looking for it that nobody knew where it was?”

“The Sons of Mjolnir did,” Steve says, troubled. “They didn’t come after us either of the last two times until after we’d gotten close. Now that we’ve actually found it, they should be all over us. Unless...”

He’s already reaching for the only weapon he has—it’s a pocket knife, he only has it because Bucky insisted he carry _something_ —but a sudden humming noise behind him tells him it’s too late even for that. “Unless they’ve already been taken care of,” Peggy says. “Is that what you were going to say, Rogers?”

Steve turns, instinctively raising his hands. Peggy’s voice has changed; she’s dropped the British accent, but she doesn’t sound entirely American now, either. It hardly matters, though, not when she has the staff, with the gem at the top now glowing brightly and aimed directly at his heart.

“You’re not working for them, then,” he says, locking eyes with her. “And I don’t think the SSR would have ordered their agent to take it by force, not when they’d have a hundred other ways to compel the Starks to cooperate. Which means… you’re working for Hydra, aren’t you? You have been all along.” When she doesn’t deny it, he says, “Why?”

“Because I’m a mercenary, and the Red Skull offered me a _lot_ of money to bring him the Tesseract,” she says. The staff is pointed at him, but she’s effectively covering Howard and Sam, too; the thing practically exudes malice now, and there’s no doubt in his mind that from where she’s standing, she could kill all three of them in as many heartbeats. “Hand it over, Rogers. Nice and slow.”

Steve has been fighting the urge to look past her at Bucky, because he’s sure Bucky is making a plan. He has to be. That’s how it was when they were kids, Bucky always rushing in at the last second to save the day. But then he hears a click, looks up, and can’t believe his eyes. Bucky is standing behind Tony, with his metal arm holding Tony in place and the barrel of his gun pressed up under Tony’s jaw.

“Do it, Stevie,” he says, voice shaking. “She’ll kill you if you don’t.”

Later, Steve will think, bitterly, that if he’d reacted immediately, he might have been able to slam into Bucky and free Tony before Peggy could stop him. But his shock is so great that for once, it doesn’t even occur to him to fight. He stares back at Bucky for a moment that seems to stretch out forever, and Bucky stares back. Finally, Steve holds the box out to Carter, who takes it one-handed and backs out of the chapel. As soon as she clears the doorway, Bucky shoves Tony toward the rest of the group and follows, pausing in the doorway with his gun still raised.

“I’m sorry, Stevie,” he says, in a voice full of anguish, “but they have my sister.” And then he’s gone.


	10. Clint

Clint Barton is used to being overlooked and underestimated. It’s not something he loves about his life, but it is something he uses, and why not? He learned way back in his carnie days that anonymity is a useful tool. All he had to do then was take off his mask and costume and head out of the big top, and nobody ever thought to associate the Amazing Trickshot with the unassuming guy who bumped into them in the crowd, mumbled an apology, and went on his way fifteen seconds before they realized their pockets were suddenly empty.

He was damn bitter about losing his hearing until he realized deafness just gave him another way to hide in plain sight. Most people discover that Clint has trouble following what’s going on in the normal course of things and react one of two ways: either they try so hard to help him that they end up making things worse (honestly, what part of _complete deafness_ makes people think the answer is talking louder and slower?) or simply write him off altogether. The woman who’s been calling herself Peggy Carter for the last six weeks did neither; she’s not the type to make careless mistakes. But she did underestimate him, and as of now, he’s lip-read more of her conversations than she could possibly guess, and learned some interesting things in the process.

On top of that, Clint’s got a way of knowing when danger is on the horizon. It’s not any kind of mystical power or sixth sense, though. It’s just that before his dad successfully drank himself into an early grave, and long before he pulled off the cliché of all clichés and ran away to join the circus, Clint worked out that seeing things other people missed was his best chance at staying alive. Keeping one eye open for thrown beer bottles or incoming fists, spotting the easy mark in a crowd who wouldn’t notice a young hoodlum lifting his wallet, sussing out the pattern of Nazi troop movements through a telescope and putting a quiet word in his sergeant’s ear: these are all tools in his arsenal, just like a gun or a knife or a bow. “Carter” played her part better than any stage actress, but there are tells, if you know what to look for: the tension in her shoulders, the way her eyes dart toward Bucky at odd moments, the way she perks up her ears when plans are being made and slips in a tweak here or there to suit her own interests. Between his eyes and his gut, he has very little doubt about where and when she plans to make her move.

So when the rest of them troop out to the little Norwegian church where Steve thinks they’ll find the tessawhatsit, Clint stays behind—or at least, he lets them think he does. Really, he gives them a five-minute head start, which is plenty of time to arm himself to the teeth. The bow, still his best weapon, is too conspicuous by half, but the principles of hand-eye coordination are the same with a pistol, or the fancy throwing knives from the long-ago circus act he performed with a pretty young acrobat on a rotating wheel, or with the slightly more specialized weapon that Peggy hasn’t seen him use before now.

He follows them to the church and waits outside, frustrated as hell that he can’t hear what’s going on, but he knows his hunch has been rewarded when a car pulls up. It’s a long, sleek black Rolls Royce, and his hand tightens on his pistol when he sees the octopus emblem on the hood ornament. But it’s not Schmidt driving, just some run-of-the-mill Hydra patsy, and while Clint could cheerfully kill anyone who’s ever worked for Hydra right down to the janitorial staff, he can’t risk giving away the long con so close to the payoff. He leans against the side of the building for a minute longer, then walks down the street and gets into another, much plainer car that’s parked there. He doesn’t have the keys, of course, but early in their joint Army service, there was a time when Bucky and Clint traded stories about their past criminal enterprises, and it turned out Bucky was more than willing to teach Clint how to boost a car in exchange for a couple of pointers on sharpshooting.

Bucky and the woman get into the Rolls, and Clint follows as it drives away.

 

“Oh, stop sulking, Barnes,” the woman says, tucking the Tesseract and its little box under the seat of the Rolls. “You got what you wanted.”

Bucky wouldn’t have guessed he had it in him to ever laugh again, but now he does, low and bitter. “What I wanted?” he says. “I just betrayed the love of my life to help the same bunch of goddamn Nazis who made me lose my goddamn arm in a war I didn’t even want to fight in. So you tell me, Peggy, or whatever the hell your real name is—how does it look _remotely_ like I’m getting anything I wanted?”

“Your lover and your friends are safe,” the woman says, as she takes her hat off and shakes out her long red hair. “And we’ve got two of the three artifacts now—the staff and the Tesseract. As soon as you find the hammer and deliver it to Schmidt, you and your sister and nephew will be free to go back to your lovely little American lives.”

“Yeah, sure. You really think I believe that once I deliver the goods to your boss, he’s just going to let me walk out of Berlin?”

“Why wouldn’t he? He won’t need you anymore. Once he has the hammer, he’ll be unstoppable.”

The woman looks unconcerned, maybe even relaxed, but under that facade, she’s one of the most highly trained fighters Bucky has ever seen, and he knows she hasn’t really let her guard down. It’s possible that he could overpower her in a hand-to-hand fight, but he’s never been much into self-delusion, and he knows that if he got the upper hand, he wouldn’t keep it for long. He might even be able to kill her, but she’d almost certainly take him with her. Part of him thinks that’s exactly what he should do, before he can do any more harm. But that would be too easy; that would be _quitting._ As long as he’s alive, there’s a chance he can still escape. Who knows, maybe he’ll even have a chance to steal some of this magical crap and deliver it to the Allies, who can turn it against Hydra. They’ll still shoot him for treason, of course, but what’s the alternative? Die here, and let Hydra take the Tesseract _and_ kill Becca and Petey?

No, Bucky tells himself. He’ll watch, and he’ll wait, and he’ll get them their goddamned hammer—if it’s real; it might not be. Of course, he didn’t think the Tesseract was real, either, when the woman approached him and told him that Hydra agents had already taken Becca and her son as captives to ensure his cooperation. Even after they found the staff, part of him was still hopeful that they might not find anything else, and he wouldn’t be able to deliver on his end of this devil’s bargain.

God, he’s so weak. Even with two innocent lives on the line, his conscience was eating him up; given enough time, he might have been able to go to Tony and tell him everything, to sacrifice his sister and nephew for the sake of the whole world. But then Steve had to walk onto that dock at the Navy Yard and right into Hydra’s clutches. If somebody had asked him what he thought about destiny three months ago, he would have said there was no such thing, just random luck and good or bad choices. But there’s exactly one person out of the whole world who Bucky would face God and walk backwards into hell for, and now he thinks that if his fate wasn’t sealed when he found a scrawny kid named Steven Grant Rogers getting beat up in an alley in 1927, then it certainly was when a scrawny adult named Steven Grant Rogers climbed aboard Tony Stark’s yacht in 1943.

Bucky lowers his head and clasps his hands together, interlocking the fingers of his right hand with the gear-driven metal digits of the left. He left his hat in the church, so there’s nothing to prevent his too-long hair from falling in his face and hiding it from the world. He must really look tragic, because the woman’s expression softens, just a little. “You could have stood the rest of it if it wasn’t for him,” she says, “couldn’t you?”

There’s no question in Bucky’s mind who she’s talking about. “Yeah,” he says simply. “I love him.”

“Oh, James,” the woman says softly, leaning down and picking up the staff from the floor of the Rolls. “If you only knew what I know.”

“What’s that?” he asks, without turning his head.

“That in less than a minute, you’re not going to care about any of this anymore,” she says, and touches the tip of the staff to his chest.

Bucky’s vision floods with the bright glowing blue of the Tesseract, and he feels it flood his mind, as well—with pictures, with ideas, but most of all with a cold, terrible sense of dominance. He fights it for all he’s worth, with a horrible sense of being on the edge of a cliff, holding on with his fingernails while an unstoppable force tries to push him over. He fights _hard,_ but this is magic he’s up against—old, strong, terrible magic. He never has a chance.

The woman watches him carefully for a full minute after the magic takes effect. She’s not letting her guard down just because this is her final task before she can claim her payment—quite the opposite, in fact. She’s probably imagining that the new Barnes looks at her with the eyes of a caged animal that’s ready to bite. As far as she knows, the original James Buchanan Barnes has been obliterated for good, and all that’s left is a shell dedicated to serving the Tesseract and its owner. She’ll never tell anyone what a relief it was when the combined magic of the staff and the cube worked as promised, though, because there’s no way that Barnes, already barely held in check by her direct threats to his family and to Rogers, would have let her live if she’d tried and failed to control his mind. And if there’s something a little wistful in her smile—if some part of her wanted to believe in the fairy-tale power of love to break the curse of the Tesseract—then nobody has to know that, either.

“Love is for children,” she murmurs, turning to face forward in her seat.

That’s when a bullet shatters the Rolls-Royce’s back window.

 

“Make your move, Barnes,” Clint mutters through clenched teeth, even though he can’t hear his own words. The woman isn’t the only one he’s been watching like a hawk lately, and he knows full well that Bucky is being compelled to help her, somehow. It infuriates him beyond words that he couldn’t figure out what kind of hold she’s got over him, because that means he doesn’t know what it will take to break it. Will just killing the woman be enough, or is Hydra blackmailing Bucky with something else? He hopes this is enough to get Bucky to turn on her, because otherwise he’s going to be in really big trouble.

Then he yells, “Aw, _fuck,”_ because Bucky has just leaned out the window of the Rolls and fired back at him.

The Rolls’ windshield is a spiderweb of cracks now, a smart move on Bucky’s part, because Clint is having a hard time seeing through that. He’s going to have to lean out the window if he wants to take another shot, and when he does, there’s a pretty good chance the next bullet will take his head off. He figures Bucky is trying to warn him off by not taking a kill shot, because he’s under no illusions about the fact that Bucky _could_ hit him if he wanted to, but either way, Clint has about five seconds to choose between giving up the chase or keeping it up and probably dying.

What Bucky didn’t consider is the third option, which is that Clint might be stupid enough to stomp on the gas.

The stolen car slams into the back of the Rolls, and the Rolls, amazingly, is the one that gives; the driver must have been jerking the wheel at the exact moment Clint rammed its back bumper, because the car careens off the road and flips— _rolls,_ har har, Bucky will appreciate that if they both survive—into the gutter. Clint slams the brakes, and his head bangs off the window of the stolen car as it screeches to a halt, with the hood crumpled into the Rolls’ now-vertical bumper. The Rolls itself lies on its side halfway off the old cobblestone street, tires spinning in the air.

Then a metal hand reaches up and rips the passenger-side door off its frame.

“Shit,” Clint yelps, when Bucky emerges from the smoking ruin of a very expensive vehicle. He’s seen the look on Bucky’s face exactly once before, in Germany, and that time, a lot of people died. For a second he’s hopeful, thinking Bucky will lay off when he realizes it’s him. Then Bucky walks, slowly and purposefully, to the door of the stolen car, rips the door off that too— _Jesus, buddy, what is it with you and doors today,_ Clint would say, if he wasn’t too dazed to talk—and physically drags Clint out of the car, throwing him almost all the way across the cobblestone street.

“Stop!” the woman shouts, as Clint’s body slams gracelessly into a couple of trash cans. Or at least, that’s what he guesses she’s saying; lip-reading is a bitch even when you’re not trying to do it upside-down. “I’ll take care of him. You get the Tesseract. Nothing is more important than the mission, do you understand? Go!”

Bucky stops, fist upraised, looking down into Clint’s face, and that’s when Clint sees it. Later, they’ll tell him he’s got a hell of a concussion, and Tony in particular will furiously accuse him of making this up, but Bucky… Bucky looks down at him, and in the eyes of his sergeant, his friend, the guy who’s been through hell with him and who’s more of a brother than goddamn Barney ever was or will be, Clint doesn’t see a trace of recognition. Bucky is looking at him the way they used to look at the Axis soldiers they sometimes dragged in for interrogation, the ones you didn’t let yourself think of as humans, because they were the enemy and it was an even bet whether you were going to have to kill them.

Bucky drops Clint—who does _not_ appreciate the fact that this bangs his head off the trash can again, although, don’t get him wrong, he’ll take that over the alternative of sudden, messy death—and strides back toward the car. Clint’s vision has gone blurry, but he can still see the woman’s feet coming toward him, in a pair of now badly scuffed kitten-heeled shoes.

Clint shakes his head weakly, hoping that’s only sweat and not blood he’s blinking out of his eyes. He’s almost out of tricks, so it’s a good thing his last one’s a doozy. His vision might be doubling and tripling at the moment, but it’s still better than the average Joe’s. His reflexes might be suffering, but his hand-eye coordination is still _pretty_ good. And a whip might be a weird thing to keep around as a last resort—it was a gift from a carnie buddy long ago, the lion tamer, of course—but when he flicks it out and it snakes around her ankles and snaps them together, even a woman who’s trained in both gymnastics and ballet can’t keep her feet. She falls to the ground beside him, her pistol clattering into the gutter. He punches her, hard, under the chin, and she goes limp in the street beside him.

Bucky doesn’t come back for her; in fact, beyond a quick glance to establish that Clint is no longer a threat, he doesn’t look at either of them again at all. Instead, he goes to the Rolls, reaches into the front seat, and casually snaps the neck of the driver. (Clint imagines a scream, cut off by a sharp crack, but that’s all it is, imagination; back when he had his hearing, he found out that death can be shockingly quiet sometimes.) Then Bucky reaches into the car, retrieves the carved wooden box that holds the Tesseract, and vanishes down a side street.

Clint leans back and closes his eyes, half aware that a crowd is gathering but mercifully unable to hear them chattering. He flops over and plays dead, waiting for some competent people to show up and sort this mess out.


	11. Natasha

“Natalia Alianovna Romanovna,” says the woman who walks into Natasha’s cell, casually carrying a tray of food as if she’s about to dine at the automat. “That is your full name, isn’t it? I’d hate to have to redo any of the paperwork.”

Natasha looks up. The Norwegian police were careful when they locked her up, even before Stark (damn him) insisted on additional precautions: her hands are cuffed behind her, her feet are shackled to the chair, and she’s shut up in a sturdy holding cell with no windows and a door made of solid steel. There’s a pattern for how a dangerous prisoner should be treated, and so far they’ve followed it to the letter. She wasn’t expecting them to send her a visitor—not for hours, maybe days, by which time she’s supposed to be so glad to see anyone that she’ll immediately start spilling her secrets. Her plan, which she was working on almost before she woke up in the cell, is to give them exactly what they expect: pretend to break down under questioning, show remorse, and cry just the right amount to gain the sympathies of the men who’ll decide her fate. But her plan hinges on being able to manipulate those men simply because they’re men. This woman is what Americans call a _wild card._

“Who are you?” she asks, reverting to the American English she spent so many years perfecting.

“You ought to recognize me, I should think,” says the woman, setting the tray down on the table between Natasha and the door. “You’ve been pretending to be me for some time now.”

Only Natasha’s impeccable training keeps her from visibly starting. But her surprise only lasts for a second or two, and then she’s busy examining the original Agent Peggy Carter. _Impeccable_ is a good word for Carter, too. Her pressed uniform and hair and makeup have a studied, habitual perfection to them that Natasha recognizes from her own education in the art of feminine beauty, which was certainly as intense as anything she ever learned on the rifle range. _We have more weapons in our arsenal than men do,_ she can almost hear Madame Kudrin saying in her sharp voice, _and the ones that do the most damage may not be the ones you expect._

The careful, deliberate perfection of the rest of her appearance gives an even more jarring feel to the black eyepatch over Carter’s left eye. Natasha wonders briefly how she lost it, then mentally shrugs and files _blind side_ under her running mental list of _potential advantages in combat._

Carter walks around behind Natasha and unlocks her handcuffs. Natasha stares at her—Carter is supposed to be one of the SSR’s best operatives, surely she wouldn’t be so stupid. Of course, even if she killed Carter, there’d still be the steel door to get through, and undoubtedly, the guards outside have been told to shoot on sight. For most people, that would be deterrent enough. “Why?” she asks.

“Why did I unchain you? Because there’s no reason not to, now that you’re on our side,” Carter says. “You should eat. We went out of our way to make a lovely meal for you.”

Natasha eyes the food on the tray, rubbing her wrists where the handcuffs chafed them. “What is it?”

“Steak.”

“What’s in it?” Natasha asks, already mentally running through her list of possible Allied truth serums and their effectiveness.

Carter has an unexpectedly devilish grin. “Cow.”

Natasha allows herself the tiniest eye-roll. “No, thank you,” she says.

“Suit yourself.” Carter sits down opposite her and starts cutting the steak with the knife—the _steak knife_ she brought into the cell with her. This woman is either a lunatic or very, very self-confident. “What do you mean,” she asks, “now that I’m on your side?”

“Oh, you defected,” Carter says, popping a bite of potato into her mouth and chewing. She swallows it and adds, “About half an hour ago. I have the cable we sent to Allied headquarters, if you’d like to read it. ‘Pleased to report N. Romanova has revealed Hydra plans to M. Carter in exchange for clemency,’ et cetera. We did encode it, so it won’t be a problem for you unless Hydra has broken our codes. But I’m sure you wouldn’t know anything about that.”

Natasha looks at her. “It doesn’t keep your hands clean, you know, if you send me back to Hydra and let _them_ kill me.”

“The offer is real,” Carter says. “It’s entirely your choice. We know you… removed yourself, shall we say, from Comrade Stalin’s Red Room a while ago. We know you took with you an impressive set of skills, although you don’t seem terribly concerned about who you use them for or on. We can work with that. Of course, the Allies won’t pay you as much as Schmidt undoubtedly parted with to procure your services, but there are other benefits to joining our side.”

“Such as?”

“You’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing the right thing.”

A laugh bursts out of Natasha in spite of everything. _“That’s_ my incentive?”

“Well, that and a certain degree of freedom, eventually,” Carter says. “You’ll have to earn it, of course. If you try to double-cross us, you’ll die in an Allied prison. Of course, that may still be better than what Schmidt will do to you if you ever show your face anywhere in the Axis again, which is why I think you’ll see the wisdom in helping us bring him down. I really don’t see how you have a choice about this.”

 _No, you probably wouldn’t,_ Natasha thinks, as she leaps up and goes for the knife.

She almost makes it, in spite of the chains around her ankles; she can move like lightning, and it isn’t that hard to compensate for the limited mobility of being strapped to a chair. Her fingers are just closing on the knife’s handle when Carter, with an air of calm deliberation that belies her own speed, stands up and punches Natasha so hard that the knife goes flying in one direction while her body goes in the other. She lands hard, and the chair she’s still strapped to breaks apart under the force of her fall.

“I’m terribly sorry about this, Agent Romanova,” Carter says, picking up the dinner tray and walking across the room to stand over her, “but you seem to be under the mistaken impression that I’m the _good_ cop.” Then she bashes the tray across Natasha’s face, and all the lights go out.

 

Steve is sitting on the sofa in Tony’s hotel suite, with Bucky’s hat still in his hands. He’s been staring at it for about as long as Stark Senior and Stark Junior have been bickering amongst themselves, but he’s not ready to put it down yet. He never asked Bucky if there was a story behind the stupid hat. Kept meaning to, but he thought there was plenty of time to get around to it.

This isn’t the way it was supposed to go.

“— _course_ I knew Stane was skimming off the top,” Senior is shouting at Junior, at the edge of Steve’s awareness. “That was half the point of this trip. By the time I get back, he’ll have taken enough rope to hang himself. Anyway, don’t tell me you’re actually worried about Stark Industries. As long as the money keeps coming in—”

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Junior shoots back. “If I was running the company, I’d be using it to do some real good. You see this?” He taps the arc reactor set into his chest. “We could be building things like this every day. We could be changing the _world.”_

 _Bucky thinks you’ve already started,_ Steve almost says—would say, if he was sure his voice wouldn’t break when he says Bucky’s name. Bucky’s very silence on the topic of the mechanical arm was what told Steve how much it mattered to him; it was like he was afraid to look too closely at the miracle in case it disappeared. Steve suddenly wonders if Bucky took any spare arc reactors for his arm. How long did he say they last? Two months? Three? Or did Bucky not take any because— _don’t think it,_ he tells himself, but of course it’s already too late—because he doesn’t expect to live long enough to need them?

“Oh, do stop fighting, you two,” says Peggy Carter—the real Peggy Carter—as she enters the room. “I don’t give a fig about Stark Industries, but you’ve both made a complete bollocks of this Tesseract business. I can’t believe it didn’t occur to _any_ of you to check a stranger’s credentials with the SSR office before letting her board your boat.” Steve is almost sure she mutters, _“Men,”_ under her breath.

“Did she take the deal?” Howard asks.

“No,” Peggy says. “And as I’m sure you know, Mr. Barton, it’s notoriously difficult to break a Red Room operative. Even if we weren’t dealing with the famous Black Widow herself, I wouldn’t have much hope of torturing any good information out of her.”

“Can I try?” says Clint, quietly.

“As they say in America, Mr. Barton,” Peggy says, “knock yourself out.” She sits down—it’s just barely too elegant to be called a _flop_ —near Steve.

“So what happens now?” Tony asks, clearly eager for some action to take.

“We’ll go after Barnes, of course,” Peggy tells him, “but it seems unlikely anything will come of it. Schmidt could hardly have chosen a better patsy. Mr. Barnes was highly trained during his Army service, and he knows how to evade pursuit. Chances are good he’s already met up with Agent Romanova’s second and left the country, probably by a small boat or some other method we’ll never trace. From there, he could be headed almost anywhere in the world. As things stand now, we have no idea what Schmidt is up to or why, much less where to start looking for Barnes and the Tesseract.”

“Well,” Steve says, “I think I might have some ideas about that.”

 

“So,” Barton says, “are we having fun yet?”

This time Natasha doesn’t hesitate to roll her eyes. It’s hard to tell which of them came out of today worse off. Besides the bandage around his head, he’s managed to pick up a black eye and a dozen cuts and scrapes in addition to the concussion that’s faintly but noticeably slurring his speech. She thought she knew what “injury-prone” meant, but it turns out she hadn’t seen anything until she met Barton. As for herself, she’s been cuffed again, this time with the chain of the handcuffs running through the bars on the back of a new, sturdy metal chair, and she can feel the swollen bruise coming up on her face. Carter hit her so hard, she half expects to see the pattern from the rim of the serving tray stamped across her cheekbone the next time she looks in the mirror.

“Well, there goes your career as a film star,” she says, and Barton—

Barton laughs.

This is also not what Natasha was expecting.

“So I came to ask you something,” Barton goes on, sitting in Carter’s vacated seat. “I was hoping I might be able to convince you to take the offer.”

“Because it’s the right thing to do and I’d be helping save the world from the cruel Reich?” Natasha hopes her tone makes it clear that it’s an idea that might fly with Rogers and his annoyingly black and white morality, or even with Barnes, poor sap of a romantic that he is, but certainly won’t cut any ice with the Black Widow, the jewel of the Red Room.

“No,” says Clint, looking puzzled. “Who’d try to convince you with something as stupid as that? I mostly just want you to tell us what we need to know to rescue Barnes, but I also kind of want you to join the SSR because I want you to be my partner.”

Natasha carefully doesn’t respond to that at all for several seconds. She uses the time to search his tone. _Partner._ At first she thinks he means something sexual by it, and then she decides, no, he doesn’t. Because the odd thing about Barton—Barton the carnie, Barton the criminal, Barton the soldier—is that there’s a part of him that still comes across as curiously naive. No… not naive, either. It’s something else, something she can’t put her finger on until she remembers Barnes, all the way back in Ireland, asking, _Wouldn’t it be a hell of a thing to believe in something?_

Barton believes in something. Maybe it isn’t much, but part of her is undeniably interested in finding out what it is.

“See, I know the SSR would take me,” Barton says, before she can decide how to respond. “After I was discharged from the Army, they offered. Barnes and I had done a couple of jobs for them before, and they figured they could get some use out of me even without working ears. But then Howard Stark decided his kid needed a couple bodyguards, and Barnes stuck his neck out to get me the job, and I thought, hell, maybe it’s time to retire from fieldwork. Save up some money and settle down, maybe buy a farm or something. But the thing is, I felt more alive matching wits with you than I had since I was on the Front. I didn’t love it that you were working for the enemy, but you sure were a hell of an opponent. And then I started thinking about all the things we could do if we teamed up. First we gotta get Barnes back, of course. I’m not gonna lie, I’m pretty pissed off about what you did to him. But you know, we’ve all got some red in our ledgers, and I thought...” He shakes his head. “This is probably really stupid, huh?”

“Red in our ledgers,” she repeats. Her English is very good, but she doesn’t think she’s ever heard that one before. And yet, she knows exactly what it means. She looks up and meets his eyes. “Is that the only reason? That you think we’d make a good team?”

“Not the only reason,” Clint says easily. “I mean, I also just like you, Natalia Romanova. Wait, is that what you go by? Because I heard everybody in Russia has, like, forty-seven nicknames or something.”

Natasha lets herself smile back at him a little, and not just because he isn’t entirely wrong about the nicknames. She’s thinking that twice today she’s let the Allies get the drop on her, and she’s studied her psychology enough to know that once is a mistake, twice is a pattern. The fact that she’s stopped even thinking about how to escape is… telling.

Maybe it’s time to listen to the little voice that’s been nagging at her for months now, the same one that keeps whispering about how nice it would be to have what Stark’s little crew takes for granted. She isn’t exactly looking for something like Rogers and Barnes have—that kind of intimacy would be frankly unnerving, even if she hadn’t just used it to coerce Barnes into the biggest mistake of his life—but the easy camaraderie that Barton has with Barnes, with Stark, and now even with Rogers: that’s a new concept to Natasha, and she envies it. She’s been so many things to so many people: a trainee, a weapon, a lover, a spy, always spinning webs of emotion but never letting herself get caught in them. It will take time for her to really trust Barton, much less for him to trust her back, but she has to start somewhere or she might end up regretting it for the rest of her life.

“Natasha,” she says slowly. “My friends call me Natasha.”

 

Steve has been carrying around the grave rubbing from the tomb in Ireland for a long time, tucked away in Howard’s journal. Now he unfolds the sheet of newsprint and spreads it out on the desk. “It’s an inscription in a very old Viking language,” he says, “from the tomb of the first man who was entrusted with the scepter. The more I think about it, the more I think he probably was an Asgardian, and that he was supposed to hide the staff somewhere separate from the Tesseract. Ireland was far enough away that it would take some doing for the staff and the Tesseract to be brought together, and close enough that it could be retrieved if it was needed.”

“And why didn’t they want the magic stick and the magic rock in the same place, where they could keep an eye on both?” Tony asks.

“Because as powerful as the Tesseract is, it’s not Hydra’s ultimate goal,” Steve says. “An unlimited energy source for their weapons would be good, but imagine if he could get his hands on a weapon that could turn the war without needing an energy source at all.”

“Just tell us what it is already and stop showing off how smart you are,” Tony says, with an elaborate eyeroll. “That’s supposed to be _my_ trick.”

The only thing that keeps Steve from losing his cool about Tony’s flippancy is knowing how deeply it hurt Tony that Bucky didn’t ask him for help. But Tony has never seen how much Bucky cares about his sister Becca. (And it has to be Becca; the other two Barnes daughters were still babies when they moved to Shelbyville, while Becca was barely a year younger than Bucky, close enough that people often mistook them for twins.) Steve is sure that Bucky would lay down his life for him, but he’d sell his soul for Becca—and maybe he has. He pushes that disquieting thought aside and says, “I’m talking about Thor’s hammer.”

“Thor’s…” Tony laughs. He’s the only one. “Thor’s hammer,” he repeats, looking slightly chastened under Steve’s flat stare. “And this does what, lets the Red Skull build amazing bookcases?”

“‘Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor,’” Steve quotes. “In the legends, Thor disobeyed Odin and almost started a war in Asgard. Odin exiled him to Midgard—Earth—and cursed the hammer so that no one who was unworthy could lift it. Thor has supposedly been wandering around Midgard in disguise all this time, looking for the one heroic deed that will make him worthy of the hammer again. Meanwhile, another legend grew up around the hammer, that someone who was worthy could pick it up and gain some of its powers. A person who wasn’t worthy… let’s just say it would be bad news.”

“Thank you for saying ‘person,’” Peggy says dryly.

“So what are the criteria for worthiness?” Tony demands. “Smartest? Strongest? Loudest? Longest beard?”

“That’s where the inscription from the grave comes in,” says Steve. “This is as far as I got when I translated it: _Across the great ocean, Mjolnir sleeps in the star’s grave, guarded by the beast of starfire. Only the_ afreksmaðr _may claim it, for death it is to disturb the beast.”_

“That’s absolutely poetic,” Peggy says, “and incredibly unhelpful. What about the word you couldn’t translate?”

“I took a cue from Tony,” Steve says. “When smart people get stuck, they find an expert. I wrote to a professor in New Mexico who probably knows more about linguistics than anyone alive. I got a letter from him right before we left Morocco. The problem is, it’s one of those words with about nine hundred different meanings. It gets translated as ‘hero’ most often, but it can also mean ‘demigod’ or ‘superior man.’”

Peggy sits up straight. _“Übermensch,”_ she says. “That’s what Schmidt considers himself. He thinks he can use the hammer because Erskine’s serum made him more than human. He must think Barnes can bring it to him and he can use it—but why would he put Barnes in the same category as himself?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says. “But if it could kill—” He stops, takes a few heartbeats to collect himself, and says, “We have to stop Bucky from trying to take the hammer.”

“No offense to your friend, Professor Rogers, but I think there’s more than one man’s life at stake here,” says Peggy. “If Barnes dies, I’m sure we’ll all be very sorry. But this starfire beast, if it ever existed, certainly would have died off millennia ago. If Barnes _is_ able to return the hammer to Schmidt, and if it _does_ confer some sort of power on the owner—”

“Bye-bye, democracy, all hail the thousand-year Reich,” Tony says. When Steve glances at him, he adds, “Not that I believe in any of this, of course. I’m just trying to think like an insane megalomaniac.”

“I’m sure that’s a stretch,” Clint says, coming back into the room. The Romanova woman is with him, and Peggy gives him a dark look.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Barton, but did I authorize you to remove the prisoner from her cell, much less the police station?”

“Well, you kinda did,” Clint says. “I mean, she works for the SSR now, right? There was a letter and everything.”

Peggy closes the one eye Steve can see briefly, then opens it again. “Fine. She’s remanded into your custody, which makes it your responsibility if she murders you in your sleep.”

Clint looks at Romanova, who shrugs. “I’m not _planning_ on it,” she says. Then she looks at Steve. “For what it’s worth, Rogers, I’m sorry about Barnes. Schmidt would have gotten someone else to do it if I hadn’t, but that’s not an excuse.”

“You’re damn right it’s not,” Steve says. “Why should we trust you?”

“You shouldn’t,” she says. There’s something different about her expression, and it takes Steve a moment to realize: she’s being honest, and it’s hard for her. “Not as things stand now. You should expect me to prove myself. But I _will_ prove myself.”

“Barnes deserved his second chance,” Clint says quietly. “Didn’t he, Rogers?”

Steve swallows an angry response. Clint is right, but he doesn’t have to like it. “Well, unless you have any idea what ‘the star’s grave’ means,” he says, turning back to the grave rubbing, “it doesn’t matter, because it took Howard thirty years to track down the Tesseract, which was the only clue to the hammer’s location.”

“I know where he meant to start,” Romanova says. “Once we had the Tesseract, Schmidt originally told me to force you to sail the _Avenger_ to South America. We were supposed to get further instructions when we had it in hand.”

“So we’ve narrowed it down to one continent,” Clint says. “Great.”

“Starfire beast,” Tony muses. “Star’s grave. Hey, Dad, what kind of radiation do meteorites emit?”

Howard turns and stares at his son for several seconds. Then he says, “If you’re thinking that ‘starfire’ means gamma radiation—”

“This so-called beast could be some kind of mutation. You had a theory about using Vita-Rays to create artificial growth—”

“—So if we assume the legend about the hammer falling to earth got started with a meteor, and Schmidt believes it’s in South America—”

“But Schmidt’s also obsessed with mythology, so if we cross-reference known impact sites with ancient ruins—”

“—Wasn’t there a study on gamma sites a couple years back? Some expedition that got lost in the jungle or something?”

The Starks might not get along in the ordinary course of things, but it seems that putting them on a project together is almost a magic trick itself; neither of them will stop until they work their way around to the answer. Steve can see that he isn’t going to be needed for the rest of this. He gets up and walks out of the room, leaving them to it.

He’s halfway down the hall toward his own hotel room—which he dreads going into because Bucky’s things are there, and he knows it’s going to hit him all over again that Bucky isn’t—when Sam Wilson calls, “Rogers, hold up.”

Steve turns. “Sam?”

Sam catches up to him quickly, then falls into step beside him. “Are you okay?” he asks.

Steve forces a smile. “I have to be, don’t I? For Bucky’s sake.”

“Steve.” Sam hesitates, then says, “I thought I knew, before the War—I thought I’d already accepted that there were some things I couldn’t fix. Could work toward them, maybe, but I might not ever live to see the solutions. But in the War… when I lost my partner, I had to face up to it in a different way. I had to learn that no matter how much you care about somebody, there are times when there’s just nothing you can do, and it’s not your fault.”

Steve shakes his head. “Bucky’s not like that,” he says. “I know it’s a long shot, but I have to try.”

“It’s gonna be dangerous, you know,” Sam says, without judgment.

“That’ll be different, since the whole expedition so far has been such a walk in the park.” Steve shakes his head again. Sam doesn’t deserve his sarcasm, not when he’s genuinely trying to help. “The thing is, Sam—after my ma died, I didn’t think I had anything left to live for. Or anyone. It’s just been a habit the last few years, keeping myself alive. Bucky changed all that. He reminded me what the point of living is. I can’t just let that go.”

“Listen,” Sam says, “I’m sorry, but from what Clint described, it sounds like he doesn’t even remember you anymore.”

Steve sets his jaw and says, “He will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eyepatch-wearing S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Peggy is just one of many delightful things to come out of the Spider-Gwen comics.


	12. Zola

_ The new fist of Hydra sleeps on the U-boat. He’s more than earned it after making the trip from Tønsberg in a little fishing boat with a German soldier who spoke to him in a language he didn’t understand and tried to take the Tesseract. The Tesseract did something to him, and now he speaks German just fine. The German soldier stopped speaking after the new fist of Hydra hit him in the throat. _

_ The U-boat’s captain, Rumlow, is more useful and less verbose than the soldier on the fishing boat. Rumlow is the one who told the new fist of Hydra what he is and how to carry out the next phase of his mission. The mission itself feels like something the new fist of Hydra has always known. He doesn’t think about how or why he knows it; it makes him uncomfortable to think there was a time when he didn’t know. The Allies would probably try to tell him he’s been brainwashed or something, but he knows better. What little he does remember of the time before is that there was pain, and fear, and a constant sense of loss. _

_ He isn’t afraid of anything anymore. He’s free. _

_ The new fist of Hydra has plenty of time to sleep while the U-boat makes its journey around Cape Horn, avoiding the Allied guns along the Panama Canal. He knows, without caring how he knows, that once they reach the coast of Peru, he’ll be called upon to do the hardest work of his life. He also knows that when he puts his hand on the hammer once owned by a thunder god, even the Tesseract, which he’d protect with his life, will seem like small potatoes by comparison. Then he’ll take both the Tesseract and the hammer back to Germany and give them to the Red Skull, who knows how to free everyone from the chains he used to wear. It will be a glorious future, and here he is, a single man who has the power to change the course of human history. _

_ It’s humbling. But not  _ very  _ humbling. The Tesseract wouldn’t speak to him if he wasn’t very, very good at his job. _

_ The new fist of Hydra sleeps, and dreams. _

 

“Barnes, James Buchanan. Sergeant. 3-2-5-5-7-0-3-8.”

The scientist is a small, fussy man with a round face made rounder by his little gold-rimmed spectacles. He nods to the guard, who steps forward and slaps Bucky across the face. “I asked you a question, soldier,” he says, in heavily accented English.

“Barnes,” Bucky repeats. He knows the rules. “James Buchanan. Sergeant. 3-2-5-5-7-0-3-8.”

The fussy scientist tilts his head and looks at Bucky for a long moment. Then he picks up something from the table. Bucky doesn’t know the name of this particular medical implement, but whatever it is, he expects that a steel bar with a flat piece on the end will hurt when it hits him.

What he doesn’t expect is that the fussy little scientist will strike him, ruthlessly, on the cauterized stump that used to be his left arm.

Bucky howls so loud and long with pain that he’s sure he’s either going to black out or the roof is going to fall in on him, but a minute later the guard is picking him up off the floor. Dazed, he tries and fails to make his eyes focus on the scientist, then finally gives up and lets his head loll forward.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” says the fussy little scientist, who’s probably never felt this much pain in his life. “We can stop that, Sergeant. I have medicines here that will take the pain away. All you have to do is answer the question.”

Bucky would like to spit in the fussy little scientist’s face, but his mouth is too dry. He contents himself with raising his head, which is hard enough, and glaring. “Barnes,” he says, “James Buchanan. Sergeant. Three… two...” And that’s as far as he gets before his voice gives out.

The scientist looks hard at him, then nods and says something to the guard in German. Bucky doesn’t understand them, but based on what happens next, he can hazard a guess at a translation:  _ Put him on the table. He’ll do. _

 

Whatever drug Zola—that’s what the guards call the fussy scientist, Herr Zola—gives him, it’s a good one. Later, the Allied officer who debriefs him will tell him he was only with the enemy for three, maybe four days, but it feels like much longer than that.

“Your arm has stopped bleeding,” Zola says. “It seems to be healing cleanly, no infection. Remarkable.” 

Bucky knows that if he thinks about what this Nazi might be pumping into his body, he’ll go insane, which doesn’t sound so bad except that then, Zola will win. Instead, he thinks about Barton, thrown in the opposite direction from him in the blast. He wonders if Barton also got rounded up in the aftermath of the battle, or if he’s lying dead in some anonymous patch of Italian mud, if there was even enough of him left to bury. Of course, with Barton’s crazy luck, it’s equally possible that he’s in a field hospital cot that feels like a feather bed after the Front, being tended to by a flock of pretty nurses. Bucky hopes so, even though he knows hope is a dangerous thing right now. War has taught him that everybody is expendable.

“Barnes,” he says, “James Buchanan. Sergeant. 3-2-5-5-7-0-3-8.”

There’s a raspy noise from the table next to his. Somebody is laughing. “That’s it, bub,” the new voice grates. “You give him hell.”

“Fuck you, too,” Bucky says, and the guy laughs again. Or maybe Bucky just imagines it. He wonders if he’s losing his mind in spite of his best efforts. Then Zola slides another needle into him and things go away again.

When he wakes up, God knows how many rounds of needles and hazy consciousness and name-rank-serial later, it’s because someone is shaking him. “Come on, bub,” the rough voice says, and Bucky opens his eyes and realizes that’s smoke he smells. The medical facility is on fire.

“Thought I imagined you,” Bucky mumbles, trying to focus his eyes on his rescuer.

“I look like a dream to you, sweetheart?”

Bucky’s laugh sounds shrill in his own ears, but he has to admit, it’s a fair point. The guy in front of him is short, but blocky and powerfully built, with a cruiserweight boxer’s stance; he wouldn’t look out of place as a bouncer in one of the clubs on the wrong side of Chicago, where Bucky found himself a time or two before things went south with the Dillinger gang. The new guy has some cuts and bruises on his face, but they don’t look serious enough to explain the amount of blood he’s spattered with. There’s something bright in his hand, a long knife maybe, and he cuts the straps holding Bucky to the table, then grabs Bucky as he nearly pitches sideways onto the floor. “C’mon, pal,” he says, and the tone is completely different, but the words, the words are the same thing Bucky used to say to Steve when he scraped him off the pavement behind the Ambassador Theater.

Bucky doesn’t think about Steve a lot anymore, because he’s taught himself not to. It hurts too much to daydream about things he can never have. But now he thinks, Christ, he was so young back then, thinking his problems were so important when there are things like  _ this  _ happening in the world.

The stranger grabs Bucky under the armpits and starts to drag him out of the burning laboratory, and Bucky lets out a scream when the stump of his arm grazes the door on the way out. He didn’t know it was possible to feel pain like that and not pass out. In fact, he’s pretty sure he  _ should  _ have passed out. The stranger has no time to waste on sympathy, though; he just grabs Bucky more securely and drags him down a corridor.

“Where are we going?” Bucky asks, muzzily.

“Anyplace is better’n here, don’t ya think?”

Bucky can’t argue with that. “What do I call you?”

“The guy who’s saving your ass,” the stranger snarls, and then there’s a whole squadron of Hydra in front of them.

Bucky can hold his own in a fight. He can. Maybe not as well when he’s recently lost an entire limb and then spent God-knows-how-long strapped to a table and being injected with God-knows-what, but he still has a mean right hook. The stranger has to handle the bulk of them, but Bucky still gets in a couple licks he can be proud of, all things considered. He even manages to grab a pistol from one of the fallen soldiers and take down a few of them permanently, but when they fall back to regroup, he realizes how absurdly outmatched they are. It looks like he and his would-be rescuer are both absolutely, definitely going to die here… and his first thought is,  _ Good.  _ If there is an afterlife, the second thing he’s going to do (after he finds out whether Steve has managed to precede him there and, if so, gives him a good chewing-out for getting his dumb little punk ass killed) is thank this stranger for the chance to die on his feet like a man, not strapped to a table like a lab experiment.

“Get behind me, bub,” the stranger says, and Bucky doesn’t even have time to ask what good  _ that’s  _ supposed to do before the Hydra soldiers open fire. They concentrate their shots on the stranger, and he falls back against the corridor wall, streaming blood and riddled with bullet holes.

Then he looks up and smiles.

Bucky raises the pistol without thinking and downs a couple more Hydra fighters while they’re still in shock, but frankly, he isn’t sure he  _ needs  _ to. The stranger is a blur of motion, all fury and flashing blades. Bucky has never seen anybody move like this, and the things in his hands—are they  _ part  _ of his hands?—cut through the Hydra squad like a hot knife through butter. At one point Bucky tries to help, but after he narrowly avoids a fountain of blood that spatters the corridor floor instead, he decides to just do the smart thing and fall back to the sidelines, sniping from a distance until they’re all down.

The stranger stands in the middle of a cluster of fallen Nazis, panting, arms thrown out at his sides. Those blades, they can’t actually be imbedded in his skin somehow, can they? Then the blades draw inward and—Christ, okay, Bucky isn’t a religious man by any stretch, but this guy is either a vengeful angel or an actual demon. He freezes, but there’s no malice in the guy’s face—not toward him, anyway.

“You coming or what?” he says, and Bucky is too mystified to do anything but follow.

 

They split up when they reach the treeline. Or rather, the guy informs Bucky that if he hikes a couple miles straight northeast, he’ll probably find the Allied line, but he himself has had about enough of this war. Bucky ordinarily has no sympathy for deserters, but he has to admit, this guy has done his part. It’s just too bad he won’t get a medal, given that he just died for his country. The guy chuckles humorlessly when Bucky says as much, and turns northwest, away from both the Hydra lab and the Allies. Then he stops, turning back.

“Hey, bub,” he says, “it’s your life, but I wouldn’t tell them what they did to you in there if I was you. You don’t want to bust out of one lab just to get stuck in another.”

“What _ did _ they do to me in there?” Bucky asks.

The guy snorts. “Tried to make you like me. I tried to tell ’em: if you ain’t born like me, you ain’t like me.” He turns his back and starts walking again.

“Hey,” Bucky calls after him. When he turns again, he says, “James Barnes, with the 107th.”

“Yeah, I got that the first five hundred times, kid.” The guy shakes his head. Then, just as Bucky gives up and starts to walk northeast, he says, grudgingly, “Logan.”

“I owe you, Logan,” he says. He must still be loopy from the drugs; not only does he not think to ask if Logan is a first or last name, he also completely forgets that _ home _ is in Indiana now and adds, “If you’re ever in Brooklyn, look me up.”

“If I’m ever in Brooklyn, it’ll be to jump off your damn bridge, pal,” Logan shoots back over his shoulder, but Bucky thinks maybe he’s smiling when he walks away. Or at least, he isn’t actively snarling, which seems to be essentially the same thing.

In retrospect, it’s probably lucky that it takes Bucky a couple of days to make his way back to the Allied lines, and that he’s half-starved and shaking with fever when he gets there. It keeps the doctors from making too much of what the smartest one keeps muttering:  _ never seen an amputation heal this clean, he shouldn’t’ve been able to walk out of there at all, hell, he should be dead.  _ Bucky keeps his trap shut and pretends he doesn’t remember much, because he figures Logan was onto something. He certainly doesn’t heal like Logan, the six weeks he spends recovering before they ship him back Stateside prove that, but he wonders—is he a little stronger than he was, and does he heal a little faster? Is his vision maybe a little sharper than it ought to be, and does he feel just a little… less human?

It’s funny, though, the way he learns to think around what happened to him. At first, it’s the only thing he can think about, but just like after he parted company with Steve, and just like after his dad died, he starts to go whole minutes without thinking about it, and then whole hours, and eventually he finds himself falling into his luxurious bed in Tony Stark’s riverside mansion and reviewing the day in his mind, only to realize he hasn’t thought about Zola at all. The present is just too  _ present. _ In time, and especially after Tony builds him the new arm, Bucky comes to the conclusion that what happened to him doesn’t have to define him. He even stops dwelling on whether what was done to him in the lab is going to kill him, either quickly or slowly. Whatever happens will happen, and either way he’s out of the Army, free and clear, sentence served. His days of hurting people for any reason are over, and nobody can ever make him do anything like that again.

He keeps thinking that until a woman who’s posing as an SSR agent approaches him on the deck of Tony Stark’s yacht one night and says, “Hello,  _ Übermensch. _ I have a job for you.” 

 

_ The new fist of Hydra wakes up panting, and his face is wet. It takes him a while to realize where he is—the bunks of the U-boat are so low and close that they might as well be coffins—and it’s only after he reaches across the bunk, opens the wooden box, and gazes at the Tesseract that his breathing starts to slow. His sleeping mind remembers things that his waking mind doesn’t; that’s all it is. He wishes he could forget those things completely. They could interfere with the mission. _

_ But the dream has already faded to nothing more than a vague sense of unease, and the soothing blue glow of the Tesseract is draining that away as well. It will be all right, he thinks. In a few days he’ll have the hammer, and none of this will ever matter again. _


	13. Peru

There’s a map in the cabin of the quin-jet, and Tony has traced the path of his expedition on it in thick red ink: New York to Ireland, down to Morocco and up again to Norway, and now a long arc all the way back across the Atlantic Ocean, with a brief stop in Grenada to refuel before the final push to Cusco. It’s a different landscape than anything Steve has seen before, a city of white walls and red roofs ringed by steep mountains, and it’s beautiful, of course, but now that he finally has time to kill, he doesn’t have the heart to break out his watercolors. He sits on the hotel patio and halfheartedly adds a pencil drawing of the town to his sketchbook instead, telling himself that he’ll show it to Bucky when he’s back.

He’s not surprised when Tony drops down on a chair beside him. “So Dad’s enthralled by the flamingos,” he says. “He’s trying to arrange to have a couple shipped back the house in California. I can only imagine what our poor butler’s gonna think when these pink devil-birds start showing up at the door.” When it becomes apparent that Steve isn’t listening to him, he sighs and says, “Can I see?”

Steve hands him the sketch with a shrug. “It’s not working,” he says. “Can’t get the perspective right.”

“Rogers, you gotta quit that. I know jack about art, but even a Philistine like me can see you’re talented. A little talented. Give yourself credit for being… twelve percent talented.” When Steve doesn’t respond, he says, “I’m not great at feelings, you know. Ask Pepper if you don’t believe me. Although you’ve seen me with my dad; why wouldn’t you believe me? But, look, what I’m trying to say is that I know what you’re going through right now.”

“Oh, really?” Steve says. “Lost many girlfriends to Nazi plots involving evil cursed artifacts?”

“All right, not _exactly_ what you’re going through,” Tony says. “But I cared about him too, and he betrayed both of us.”

“He didn’t have a choice!” Steve’s hands ball up into fists before he realizes it, and he forces himself to take a deep breath and put the pencil down. “They have his sister.”

“And if he’d _told_ anybody that, we could’ve done something about it. You two and your damn Brooklyn pride, nobody can help either of you except your own damn selves.”

“Really? This from you?”

“Yeah, yeah, kettle, meet pot. The point is, he had reasons, not excuses. And deep down, you think the same thing. You know how I know?”

“Please, do tell,” Steve says flatly.

“If you figure Schmidt has it right with his superhuman theory,” Tony says, “he wouldn’t go to this much trouble to get Barnes unless he knew something about Barnes that we don’t. If you thought ‘more than human’ was the right translation, you’d have that to console you. So what do you think a guy needs to be to wield Thor’s mighty hammer?”

“Doctor Blake thinks the best translation is ‘good man,’” Steve admits.

“And you don’t think Barnes qualifies.”

“Bucky _qualifies,”_ Steve says hotly. Then he slumps. “I just don’t know if it counts when he’s not in the driver’s seat. I don’t know what the rules are for magic, but I’m not really expecting… fairness.”

“Yeah. Complicates things, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Steve says. “It isn’t complicated at all, Tony. That’s what you don’t understand. It doesn’t matter how we got here. What matters is, Bucky’s in trouble and he needs my help, which means I have to try.” He raises his eyes to meet Tony’s and says, heavily, “He’s my friend.”

“Yeah,” Tony says. He reaches out and puts a hand on Steve’s shoulder. “But, Steve, buddy… so am I.”

Steve swallows hard. “You have the coordinates for the temple?” he asks.

“I can get us close enough for government work.”

“Then let’s go.”

 

In the end, once Howard and Tony finished narrowing it down, there was only one place that ticked every box on the list Tony scrawled in his father’s repurposed diary. At the top of one of Peru’s many low mountains, there’s a meteor crater almost a mile wide; in the middle of the crater is an artificially constructed hill, and on the hill is a temple to the Inca thunder god. Granted, the people who built it called him Illapa, not Thor, but Steve has pretty much ceased to believe in coincidences lately. On top of that, Howard has a gizmo that measures what he calls Vita-Rays, and according to him, the mountain and its surrounding jungle are swimming in them. “But don’t worry,” he tells them cheerfully, “you’d have to spend, oh, a hundred and fifty years or so in this part of the world to feel the effects. And even then, they’re as likely to be beneficial as harmful. The locals say the animals in this part of the world grow twice as big as normal.”

“We’d feel the effects pretty fast if a double-sized jaguar ate us,” Clint observes, and Natasha, close behind him, makes a little amused sound. According to Carter’s orders, not only does Natasha stay cuffed until Carter says otherwise, she also stays within punching range of Clint every moment she isn’t in a brig, and Tony and Sam are both authorized to shoot her if she breaks that rule. Steve isn’t, because Carter doesn’t trust him to follow through on it, and she’s half-right. Steve isn’t sure he could go through with murder in cold blood, but if anything happens to Bucky… well. Long story short, he _wants_ to believe Natasha’s change of heart is genuine, but he also won’t trust her again unless she earns it.

According to Sam’s aerial reconnaissance, it’s impossible to land the quin-jet closer than a couple of miles from the temple, which means they’ll have to hike through the jungle to get there. Steve nods when he hears this and quietly gears up in his work clothes and hiking boots. He straps his pistol, which he’s still never fired, to one side of his belt and Bucky’s machete to the other. He briefly considers how much mockery he’s willing to endure, then decides he doesn’t give a shit and puts on Bucky’s hat as well. Tony raises an eyebrow when he sees it, but Clint nudges him hard and he keeps his mouth shut.

Howard flatly refuses to leave the quin-jet, muttering darkly about how the jungle is full of snakes. Tony concedes, with a mildness that can only mean he’s storing this up for future mockery, that someone really should stay and guard the plane. The real Peggy Carter, on the other hand, gives Howard Stark such a contemptuous look when he asked if she wouldn’t be more comfortable waiting there with him that nobody else dares to say another word about either her presence or Natasha’s. It goes without saying that she’s not being left alone with only Howard to stop her from escaping her bonds and making off with their ride home.

There’s no trail through this part of the jungle, so when they set out for the temple, Clint walks ahead of the others, cutting a path with a machete of his own. It’s an uphill hike through terrain that seems to be made of equal parts rocks, brambles, and tiny biting insects, and that’s not even taking into account the heat, or the air so humid that everyone is immediately drenched with sweat. It isn’t long before Steve is lagging behind the rest of the party.

“You all right, Rogers?” Sam calls back to him, when they stop for their first rest.

“I’m fine,” Steve says, trying not to wheeze as he jogs the last few steps to catch up. When Sam’s look turns deeply skeptical, he says, “It’s fine, I’m _fine,_ everything is fine, okay?”

Of course that’s when something lunges out of the bushes and grabs him. Of _course_ it is.

Before today, Steve would have said he didn’t know of such a thing as a reptile smell, but some primitive part of his brain knows the dry, musky odor for what it is the second it hits him. It’s blind luck that the thing sunk its claws into his pack rather than his body; it throws him to the ground, but he somehow manages to roll and keep the pack between himself and it. He struggles to break free as it rolls him, lashing out blindly with his fists and feet. A weight settles on his chest and a blast of hot, rank breath hits his face, and he has just enough time to register a pair of eerie gold eyes gazing down at him from a scaly brown-green face.

 _No,_ he thinks, making a last desperate grab for the pistol on his belt. _I spent my whole life in Brooklyn and I’m not going to die in the jungle getting eaten by a lizard._ His hand closes on the pistol, but before he has time to fire it, three shots ring out in quick succession.

The reptile freezes, with an expression of open-mouthed shock that would be almost comical if it didn’t reveal so many teeth. Then it drops, twitching, and Steve scrambles out from under it as Peggy reaches out to help him up. Tony is behind her with one of the gloves from his rocket suit looped over his hand, ready to fire one of his energy blasts at the animal if it moves again, but Steve can see that it won’t; there’s a neat round bullet hole right between its eyes.

“What the hell is that thing?” he demands.

“That,” Peggy says matter-of-factly, “is a dinosaur.”

Steve stares at the creature. Lying there twitching in its death throes, it looks disappointingly small for something that almost killed him: it’s under five feet long and most of that is tail. Its claws, however, are long, curved, and wickedly sharp. Steve saw _Fantasia_ six times when it was in the theater, and now he thinks Walt Disney has some serious catching up to do.

“Okay,” Tony says, “I try to keep an open mind, but Carter, you’re just wrong about this one. I’m a scientist, all right? Entirely aside from the fact that they’re extinct, dinosaurs are reptiles, and reptiles don’t have feathers.”

“Yes,” Peggy says, with a world-weary air, looking down at bright blue and green plumage that forms a ridge from the crest at the top of the animal’s head to the long tuft at the end of its tail.“Twenty minutes ago you knew that dinosaurs are extinct, and if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have feathers. Two weeks ago, you also knew that magic didn’t exist. A month ago, you knew that the Tesseract was just a myth, that Norse gods had never walked the earth, and that your father was just a silly old man who was off on another wild goose chase. So I’m sure, Mr. Stark, that we should have absolute faith in your scientific conclusions. Now, Steve,” she says, “are you all right?”

Steve gets up and brushes himself off. He’s got some new bruises, but nothing he can’t walk off. If there’s one thing he knows, it’s how to pick himself up when life knocks him down; if it’s going to start doing that by throwing dinosaurs at him, well, at least there’s a novelty factor. “Yeah,” he says.

“Then let’s keep moving,” says Peggy. She’s looking at Steve with new respect, and she falls in beside him when they start walking again. “That was impressive,” she says. “You know how to keep your head in a crisis.”

“Maybe that’s because my life has been one long series of them,” Steve says wryly. “Honestly, that wasn’t as bad as the time I got beat up in the alley by the butcher shop. Or behind the movie theater. Or in the parking lot.”

“Did you have something against running away?” Peggy asks, not unkindly.

Steve shrugs. “You start running, they never let you stop. Besides, after a while, word got around that Bucky was looking out for me. Not always by fighting, either, although he won a lot of fights for both of us. One of us had to be smart about things. Sometimes he’d just put a word in the right person’s ear. Once he stole a guy’s girlfriend,” he adds, smiling. “He spent three dollars trying to win the girl a stuffed bear at Rockaway Beach, but in the end she went to the big high school dance with him, and he said it was worth every penny just to see the look on the guy’s face.”

“Sounds a bit unfair to the girl,” Peggy says.

“Trust me, he was doing her a favor. The guy was a bully to her, too. Bucky was the one who convinced her she could do better.”

“If you’re trying to convince me of your friend’s moral character in hopes that I’ll be more lenient to him when we have him in custody,” Peggy says, “this is an odd way to go about it.”

“Can you do that?” Steve says, surprised. “I mean, of course I understand there’ll be consequences. I just want him to be alive to face them, and we’ll deal with whatever happens after that. But if you want to know why I’m fighting so hard for him, that’s why. Because even when I had nothing, I had Bucky. And Bucky always had my back.”

“Guys,” Clint calls from the head of the line. “I think we found it.”

 

The jungle stops abruptly at the edge of what must have been an immense crater a few thousand years ago. Now the land, terraced with ancient stone walls, slopes gently downward into a grassy bowl-shaped depression until the ruins of an ancient city start to rise out of it. In the center of the city, the terraces lead upward to a stone pyramid that has to be the temple. Steve puts its height at a hundred feet at a conservative estimate.

“Well, I still don’t know about this god of thunder business, but something about this place must have really impressed someone,” Tony concedes, eyeing the stone stairs they’ll have to climb to reach the dark rectangle of a door near the top.

“So help me, Stark, if you put on your rocket pack and fly up there just to show off, I will _become_ worthy of the hammer just so I can hit you with it,” Clint says. “Rogers, you gonna make it up all those stairs?”

Steve takes a deep breath, which is even harder than usual at this altitude. “I’ll make it,” he promises, and stops himself from adding, _if it kills me._

It probably would kill him if Clint didn’t stop twice to let him catch his breath, but both times, Tony looks glad to have the chance to regroup as well. “You know,” Natasha observes, eyeing the heavy case that holds the rocket pack, “if I had my hands free, I could help you carry that.”

“No,” Peggy says.

Tony looks tempted, but he lets it drop. “So what do you think we’re going to find inside?” he asks instead. “Hammer sitting on a pedestal, single beam of sunlight shining down on it?”

“That never happens,” Clint says. “Never.”

 

The hammer is sitting on a pedestal, with a single beam of sunlight shining down on it.

“Well,” Clint says, “that was unexpected.”

Steve looks down at the hammer and lets out a sigh of relief. It’s still there. Unfortunately, it’s also a long way down. The temple door opens onto a flat ledge with switchback staircases leading down from each side. The number of stairs between landings never seems to be the same twice, and some of the ledges face doors leading off into hallways, while others are blocked by rubble and a few don’t have doors at all. The skylight that illuminates the hammer is also only one of several, but their placement seems as random as the doors’, casting a strange pattern of light and shadow that’s only made stranger by the carved masks adorning the walls. A few of them look like they represent figures from the Norse myths—the bearded face with a tarnished gold patch over one eye can only be Odin, and the horned figure with turquoise eyes could be Loki—but they remind Steve a little of the pictures of dolphins and elephants in medieval European art, the ones that look like the artist is drawing from a thirdhand description without having seen anything close to the original. The whole thing gives him a sense of dizzying unreality—so much so, in fact, that at first glance, the man sitting on the ground with his back to the hammer hardly seems strange at all.

Steve glances at Tony for confirmation, then clears his throat and leans over the railing. “Uh,” he says, “hi. I don’t suppose you speak English, do you?”

The man looks up, and Steve is struck again by how ordinary he looks—well, to Steve’s eyes, anyway. He’s a white man whose dark curly hair is starting to go gray, and his clothes are in tatters, but they were definitely made in the current century; he wouldn’t seem out of place in a Brooklyn soup kitchen. When he looks up at them, his expression is puzzled. “Hi,” he repeats, and then, as if he’s just remembered something important, he scrambles to his feet. “What year is it?”

“Year?” Steve repeats. “It’s 1943.”

“’43,” the man’s lips move silently. Then he says out loud, “Sorry. The last time anybody came in here, it was ’38. Germans. You’re not with them, are you?”

“No,” Steve says. “We’re Americans. And an Englishwoman and a Russian,” he adds, when Peggy clears her throat. “How long have you been here?”

The man doesn’t seem to hear the question. “Are you here for the hammer?” he asks.

“Yes,” says Steve.

“Then you should probably come down here so we can talk.”

 

Steve goes down first, navigating the stairs with extreme caution; they’re worn in the middle of each block from centuries of feet, and the builders evidently weren’t too concerned about keeping the heights uniform even when they were new. Halfway down, he works out that the inside of the temple must have been constructed earlier and more hastily than the outer structure of the pyramid, which makes him wonder whether the builders were more concerned with keeping something inside these walls than keeping anyone who wanted the hammer out.

“Who are you?” Steve asks, when he steps off the final stair.

“I’m… I was… a scientist named Bruce Banner,” the man says, and Steve hears a rare noise of genuine surprise from Tony, who’s just behind him.

“Banner? From the team that _discovered_ gamma radiation? Your work is still unparalleled back home,” Tony says, stepping forward and holding out his hand. “Tony Stark.”

Bruce looks at him blankly. “Who?”

“Howard Stark’s son,” Clint says, from the stairs.

“Oh, of course. I’m a big fan of your father’s work,” Bruce says.

If his first concern wasn’t getting the hammer and getting out of here, Steve would think that the look on Tony’s face was worth the entire trek through the jungle. “How did you get here?” he asks.

“There was a… an expedition,” Bruce says, slowly, as if he hasn’t spoken to anybody in so long that he’s gotten rusty. “We were developing a process to take readings on gamma rays, and the university in Lima kept getting spikes on their test samples. MIT sent half a dozen of us down here to take a look. We thought we could learn so much if we could find a gamma source in this jungle.” He hesitates. “All six of us made it here. There was this old man guarding the hammer—ancient, not much more than a skeleton. He told us he was cursed to be the guardian of this place until someone else came along. I laughed. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why it picked me.”

“Picked you,” Steve repeats.

“One of the other scientists picked up the hammer,” Bruce goes on. “I… I blacked out, but I remember some of it. Too much. After that, I… I couldn’t leave. I mean, I _really_ couldn’t leave. It slowed down my aging, too—at least, I think so. Time gets funny down here. If it’s 1943, then I must have been here for… twenty years, give or take.”

“What happens when you try to leave?” Peggy asks, in the sudden silence that follows this pronouncement.

“Nothing good,” Bruce tells her. “If anyone who isn’t worthy tries to take the hammer, bad things happen to them, too. Some of the Germans are still here, in the side tunnels. Well… parts of them.”

“And what determines if someone’s worthy?” Steve asks.

“I don’t know,” Bruce says, shaking his head. “I just know I’m not.”

“Okay,” Steve says. “Can you give us a minute to talk this over?” He already knows what he’s going to do: obviously, he’s going to try to grab that hammer. The others can be ready to run if something happens to him, but he’s not going to leave it here if there’s a chance he can stop Bucky from getting it.

Bruce nods and retreats into a side tunnel, and Tony watches him go. “Bruce Banner,” he says softly. “Son of a bitch.”

“Language, Tony,” Steve says, and then is sorry he did, because it just reminds him more sharply that Bucky isn’t there to pick up the joke. “What’s our play here?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Natasha says. It’s been so long since she’s spoken at all that everyone turns to stare at her, and she shrugs, holding out her cuffed hands. “Oh, no, I know I’m not _worthy,”_ she says, with heavy irony. “But I thought we all understood that Carter brought me along on this expedition for bait. You’ll all go up to the top ledge, and I’ll try to lift the hammer and see what happens. If it’s booby trapped, you’ve lost nothing. Besides, I’m the fastest. I’ll have the best chance to escape if something goes wrong.”

“Congratulations, Agent Romanova,” Carter says, before Clint can protest. “You almost convinced me to let you out of those cuffs, but I’m afraid you’ll have to work a little harder than that.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Tony says. “I was the only one who wasn’t affected by the scepter—”

“And we still don’t know why,” Steve says.

“Don’t we? Romanova said the scepter needs to be close to your heart to work, and I don’t have one,” Tony says. When Steve just looks at him, he says, “Seriously, I think my arc reactor disrupted the energy from the scepter. There’s a decent chance it’ll do the same with the hammer. Also, apologies to Sam, but until I build him a bird suit, I’m the only one who can _fly.”_

“Don’t apologize to me,” says Sam. “I’m not touching that thing.”

“You’re damn right you’re not, and Tony isn’t either,” Steve begins. “I’m the one who has the most to lose here. If any—Clint, wait! What are you doing?”

“You’re all wasting time,” Clint says. He’s already in the middle of the circle, reaching for the hammer’s handle.

“Clint, no!” Steve shouts, moving forward to stop him, but then a lot of things happen at once.

The most important of them is the gunshot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why, yes, Steve's expert is _that_ Dr. Donald Blake. (There was going to be more on him, but I ran out of time to write it.)


	14. Mjolnir

_ The new fist of Hydra sights down the barrel of his rifle. Rumlow, beside him, makes an impatient noise, but the new fist of Hydra motions for him and the half-dozen heavily armored Hydra soldiers behind him to wait. If Rumlow had his way, he would have blown this whole operation already. He’ll only have the element of surprise once; ruin it now, and everything goes to hell.  _

_ He’ll wait and see which of them goes for the hammer. That’s the one they need to worry about. The superhuman. _

_ He’ll admit, he doesn’t expect it to be that one. The taller blonde guy just looks so… ordinary. But then, the new fist of Hydra imagines he could pass as ordinary, too, if he wore a coat and gloves to hide his metal arm. He mentally shrugs off the question—questions outside the parameters of the mission only lead to pain. Literally. The few times he’s tried it, he’s ended up feeling like his brain was being torn apart, as if the Tesseract itself is displeased with him—and steadies the rifle with his left arm while he eases back on the trigger with his right hand. _

_ The redheaded woman sees him. She’s the only one who does. The glint of metal must catch her eye, and she looks up, but it doesn’t matter. The bullet is already on its way to the target. _

_ The new fist of Hydra expected chaos, and he wasn’t wrong. He can’t stay at the top of the pyramid and snipe them down—keeping still would make him an easy target, and he’s hardly afraid of a little hand-to-hand. But he does expect them to be shaken, scared, and he’s astounded when he doesn’t get it. _

_ In the time it takes him to jump down to the lowest landing, six very distinct things happen: _

_ The little blonde, the one he pegged early on as the lowest potential threat, looks up at him and mouths, “Bucky,” with an expression of pain that tugs at what passes for the new fist of Hydra’s heart. He wonders who Bucky is—is Bucky what they call the superhuman, the one he shot?—but the question is irrelevant, and he shies away from it before the Tesseract can hurt him for asking it. _

_ The dark-haired man with the odd little beard and moustache slings a metal pack over his shoulders and rises off the ground. This doesn’t surprise the new fist of Hydra as much as it probably should. _

_ The brunette woman pulls a pistol and starts firing at him. _

_ The redheaded woman slips out of her handcuffs.  _

_ The black man pulls a knife out of his belt, although what he thinks he’s going to do to a superhuman with  _ that  _ is a mystery. _

_ The man who reached for the hammer just falls down. _

Steve doesn’t realize he’s frozen in place until the rest of the Hydra fighters open fire. But his fight-or-flight instincts have been trained by years of practice that no matter how big the enemy looks,  _ fight  _ is always the right option. He noticed, on his way down, a couple of rounded shields on the wall, and he grabs the nearest of them, a heavy bronze circle with a star emblem in the middle, using it for cover while he runs across the room to Clint. 

He’s looking for a pulse when Clint confirms that he’s alive by groaning. Good—but he won’t stay that way for long if he’s lying in the middle of a gunfight. Steve grabs him under the arms and gives an experimental pull, but he barely manages to shift Clint’s weight.  _ Oh, come on,  _ he tells himself, bracing his feet and pulling again—and then Natasha is beside him, adding her own efforts to the process.

Between the two of them, they pull him behind the cover of some fallen stone blocks. Peggy is already there, and when one of the Hydra soldiers starts to line up a shot on Steve, she fires first, putting a neat bullet hole in his chest. How the hell does she aim so much better with one eye than he does with two, Steve wonders, and then he hears Natasha say, “He’s losing a lot of blood. I need something to bandage this.”

“Here.” Steve drops the shield long enough to strip his shirt off and hand it to her, and she wads it up and presses it over the exit wound in Clint’s abdomen. Clint is rapidly developing the chalky look of someone in deep shock; Steve spares a second to squeeze his shoulder, then risks a glance around the stone blocks and ducks back again as a bullet, he doesn’t know whose, flies past him. “Stay here,” he hears himself say—later, he’ll think that was dumb; it’s not as if Clint’s going to get up and start doing the Charleston—and raises the shield again, watching for his chance to move.

“Rogers, what are you doing?” Peggy shouts.

“Someone still has to get that hammer,” he says.

“You’re an idiot!”

“I’m sorry!” he says, but not before it’s too late for her to stop him. The shield catches the bullet one of the Hydra soldiers fires at him, but it leaves a fist-sized dent in the relatively soft bronze. Fortunately, nobody else is overly concerned about him at the moment. Above them, Tony is keeping most of the Hydra crew busy. Steve is glad to see he’s spared a moment to pull on his heavy jacket with the metal plates sewn inside, and his helmet; hell, if any of the people who built this place were here, they might think Tony was one of their gods, blasting his enemies with fire from heaven. And somehow or other, Sam has gotten the attention of the one who seems to be in command and, incredibly, disarmed him; Steve wonders briefly if the Army had any idea at all what they threw away when they let Sam go. That means everyone is accounted for except for Bucky, and Bucky—

Steve’s heart sinks all the way down to his feet, because Bucky is walking, slowly and purposefully, toward the hammer, and bending down to pick it up.

 

Steve will never be sure exactly how he gets there first. All he knows at the time is that he drops to the ground and throws himself at the hammer like a baseball player sliding home, and somehow, miraculously, his fingers touch the handle barely an inch ahead of Bucky’s. He doesn’t think about the hammer being cursed; he doesn’t think it might kill him; all he thinks about is saving Bucky. But when his hand wraps around the handle, a jolt that feels like electricity shoots through his entire body. Steve has felt a lot of pain in his life and he figures he has a pretty high tolerance, but he’s never felt pain like  _ this,  _ and for the first time he realizes, on a deep, gut-reaction level, that if he keeps holding on, he might not live through it.

But the alternative is that Bucky might not live through it, so he grips the handle tighter and pulls the hammer toward him.

He hears himself let out a raw, throat-tearing scream, and the pyramid is flooded by an impossibly bright light, brighter than Tony’s arc reactor, brighter than anything he’s ever seen. He squeezes his eyes shut, and there’s a sensation of tearing, of  _ stretching,  _ that he’ll try to describe later as like the time he dislocated his shoulder, but everywhere. His body feels like it’s trying to rip itself apart from the inside. Lights pop behind his eyelids, and in the flashes, he sees—

Asgard? It has to be Asgard. A golden city with all the vastness of space spread out behind it. But it’s only one of the places on the World Tree that are connected by the rainbow bridge. He sees all of it: worlds, stars, planets. Midgard, seen from a distance, a blue-and-green ball streaked with white clouds, growing larger as the hammer rushes toward it. And then—then—

Then he realizes that the pain has stopped, and that he’s not only alive but still standing, and holding Mjolnir, the hammer of Thor, in his hand.

He understands the hammer now: it’s not quite sentient, exactly, but a thing with a will of its own. He knows he could throw it as far as he can, and it will come back to him; he knows that with some practice, he could use it to call down lightning and burn the Hydra soldiers to ash. This could be the tool that singlehandedly wins the war, for one side or the other. And all of this is so overwhelming, so completely baffling, that Steve, who’s still busy being astounded that he’s not dead, barely notices the other thing that’s happened.

Everybody else in the place notices it, though, that’s for damn sure. Peggy and Natasha and Tony and Sam are all openly gaping at him, and that’s when he looks down and realizes—

Oh.

_ Oh.  _

In retrospect, it’s obviously kind of a shock to realize he’s suddenly standing six-foot-two and has put on nearly a hundred pounds of bone and muscle in ninety seconds. But he’s not ready for it, not at all, and the shock is so great that he makes a mistake that’s very nearly fatal.

He drops the hammer.

The man they’ll later identify as Brock Rumlow has broken away from Sam in the confusion, and when the hammer falls, he’s right there to grab it. He’s laughing when his fingers close around the handle. Then his laughter turns to confusion, and he tugs on it harder, clearly expecting it to snap up into his hand like it did for Steve. But the hammer stubbornly refuses to budge.

“Oh, now, that was a really bad idea,” Bruce Banner says.

Rumlow looks up from the hammer, and his eyes widen in shock. Steve, who’d almost forgotten about the scientist in all this mess, turns to look and sees it, too: Bruce’s face is starting to change. He almost seems to be  _ rippling,  _ and his eyes are gleaming green.

“Now,” he says, his voice growing deeper and rougher and louder with every syllable, “now you’re gonna have to talk to the Other Guy.”

 

Steve grabs the hammer and runs. Whatever just happened to him, he’ll figure it out later, but right now Bruce is… changing… and it’s one thing to fight when you know you can’t win if it’s for a good reason, but Steve has no reason to fight Bruce and every reason to try to get his friends out before things get any worse. He eyes the distance from the floor to the temple entrance and shouts, “Tony! Get Clint out of here.” He doesn’t see Natasha anywhere, but he spots Peggy and Sam and shouts, “You two go! I’ll catch up!” Both of them must see in his face that there’s absolutely no point arguing, because they make a run for the stairs. They’re halfway to the first landing when the creature that was previously Bruce Banner smashes a massive green fist into the stone. Peggy yelps as her foot slips, and Sam catches her and pulls her back just before she goes over the edge, but Steve can see that another hit will shatter that staircase and trap them down here.

“Hey!” he says, and flings the hammer at what, for want of a better word, he’ll continue to call Bruce for now.

Mjolnir is heavy and fast, and when it strikes Bruce in the chest, it knocks him halfway across the temple floor—but it doesn’t hold him back for long. Steve catches the hammer out of the air as it rebounds, and he grabs the shield when he runs past it, too, not even thinking about the fact that it’s probably useless against a creature this big. Bruce is back on his feet faster than something that size should be after it hits a stone wall hard enough to crack it, but it’s not Steve he’s looking for. His focus is on Rumlow, who’s currently firing a pistol at Bruce. At this point, Steve isn’t even surprised to see that the bullets are bouncing off him harmlessly. Steve doesn’t object to the Nazi soldier finishing his life right here, but Bruce definitely isn’t in his right mind, and he can’t be allowed to go after anyone else. 

He raises the hammer to throw it again, but something hard and heavy crashes into him from behind.  _ Bucky. _

It’s too late to turn around and defend himself, so he lets Bucky knock him forward, then rolls with the momentum of his fall. Bucky lands on top of him, metal fist raised, and Steve lifts the shield just in time to stop a punch that crumples the bronze disc and probably would have broken his jaw. He tosses the shield away and gets back to his feet. This new body does everything he asks it to do, but he’s not used to the physics of it yet, and he stumbles, which turns out to be good, because he manages to trip right out of the way of a punch. He turns and finds himself facing Bucky, both of them poised to move.

“Bucky, please don’t make me do this,” Steve says, but when Bucky’s impossibly blue eyes meet his, his heart sinks right through the temple floor. Bucky’s expression is lifeless, cold, with no compassion or even recognition. So it’s true: the Tesseract has him. He doesn’t know who Steve is or what they’ve meant to each other for most of their lives; he’s only pausing now to size up his opponent.

Steve braces his feet and raises the hammer, and that’s all the invitation Bucky needs to lunge at him.

Steve’s been in a lot of fights, and he’s got the theory down pat. He’s just never had the strength or the reach to put it into practice before. And he’ll cop to the thing Bucky used to grumble at him about: a lot of his so-called strategy does involve hurling himself at his opponent and hoping for the best, or, failing that, waiting for the other guy to get tired from throwing punches. The thing is, in this body, those things  _ work.  _ Steve’s been taking hits since he was six, but now he can keep his feet and they don’t knock him flying. He’s always known how to duck and weave and feint, but now he doesn’t get winded. And he knows how Bucky fights: he’s faster and stronger now and he’s picked up a couple of new tricks, but there are a few key moves that worked for him when he started boxing at fourteen or fifteen and that still work for him now. He favors his left side more than he used to, but Steve still knows exactly when he’s about to try that go-for-broke haymaker that won him so many fights against opponents who never realized that was the best time to slip in under his guard. And that’s exactly what Steve does, going in low and knocking Bucky to the ground.

There are two reasons this doesn’t win him the fight then and there. First, he’s fighting to subdue, which means he’s hesitant to do more than block with the hammer, while Bucky is fighting to maim or kill; and second, that’s when Bruce, who’s abandoned Rumlow’s motionless body on the floor and is now going after Peggy again, crashes into the wall of the pyramid so hard that a crack runs all the way up the wall, and the blocks above them start to fall in.

“Shit!” Steve hears Tony say, from somewhere above him. “Rogers, get out! This whole place is about to collapse!”

It seems impossible that something as big as this pyramid would fall in, but then again, it’s very, very old, and the thing Bruce turned into is very, very big, and the way the stones above them are starting to grind and creak—yeah. It’s time to get all of the survivors out of here. Steve makes a break for the stairs, expecting Bucky to chase him, but Bucky, with no goal in the world beyond grabbing Mjolnir, lunges for him and tackles him.

Flat on his back, Steve looks up at the pyramid entrance and sees Tony grabbing Peggy around the waist, helping her through the doorway, with Sam close behind. He sees the Bruce-thing pound up the stairs after them and hurl itself against the wall, sending rubble flying in all directions, blocking their best escape route. And in the time it takes him to get to his feet, he comes to a decision. 

“I’m not gonna fight you, Buck,” he says, and gently lowers the hammer to the ground. 

Bucky stares at him, just for a second, puzzled, almost insulted:  _ how stupid can this guy be?  _ But it’s the first real emotion Steve has seen him display since Norway, and this time when he rushes Steve, Steve lets himself fall, staying down as Bucky throws punch after punch at his face. The physical pain is nothing to the fact that the fists belong to Bucky, but he has to believe that the Bucky he loves is still in there. Yeah, he knows it’s probably like Sam said: the man he loves is probably gone. But if there’s even the slightest chance that he can save Bucky, then a little pain is a small price to pay for it.

When Bucky finally runs out of steam, he gets up, looks at Steve, and shakes his head, as if he’s trying to remember something. Then he gives up and moves toward the hammer, lying on the ground a few feet away. 

Steve reaches up, grabs his right hand, and pulls him back. “No,” he says.

Bucky aims a savage kick at his ribs, and Steve feels at least one of them break. “Let  _ go,”  _ he says.

“I’m not gonna let you take that hammer, Buck,” Steve says. “You might as well give up. You know how stubborn I am.”

“I—don’t—know you,” Bucky says, and this time his kick knocks the wind out of Steve completely. When Steve lies still, gasping, for a few seconds, Bucky decides he’s going to stay down and starts to move toward the hammer again.

Steve doesn’t know where he finds the will to roll over, much less push himself up and stagger back to his feet. Bucky stares at him, and now it’s an expression Steve knows all too well: a sort of horrified disbelief. It’s an expression he’s seen so many times that even though his face is a mess of bruises and blood is running down his chin from a split lip, Steve feels himself smiling.

“C’mon,” he says. “I can do this all day.”

Steve doesn’t consciously remember that it’s the first thing Bucky ever heard him say, when they were both nine years old and Bucky was standing at the mouth of an alley, deciding whether to intervene and rescue the neighborhood shrimp from those damn Dooley kids. He says it out of habit, more than anything. But he sees the moment it breaks through, all the same. He sees Bucky’s eyes widen, like a haze over his vision is starting to clear. He parts his lips, just a little, like he’s going to say—

That’s when Natasha hits him in the back of the head with the butt of a purloined Nazi rifle.

“Stop!” Steve cries, but it’s too late; Bucky crumples, and Steve has no idea how he manages to move fast enough to catch him. “He was coming back,” he shouts at her.

“Maybe, maybe not, but we don’t have time for an emotional scene, Rogers!” she snaps. “This place is falling down around our ears. Get the hammer and I’ll help you get him out of here.”

Steve grabs the hammer and slides the strap over his wrist, then heaves Bucky’s limp body over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “Go,” he says, “I’ve got him.”

She shrugs and goes ahead of him, ducking nimbly around the biggest of the fallen boulders and heading for the mostly intact staircase on the far side of the room. Steve hauls Bucky after her and starts to climb. Even in his new body, which feels like it has unlimited strength compared to the old one, it’s not easy; he didn’t realize how much weight the metal arm added to Bucky’s decidedly not-small frame. Still, he’s almost at the entrance when he feels them shake under his feet. Either a massive stone just fell, or Bruce crashed into a wall and it finally gave. He goes down on one knee, and there isn’t room for him to fall without either hurting himself or dropping Bucky fifty feet down to the floor of the pyramid, so he instinctively rolls so that Bucky is on the inside of the staircase, next to the doorway. Bucky’s completely limp body flops over the top stair, and Steve grabs the edge as he starts to slide, almost going over. 

“I’ve got him,” Sam says, grabbing Bucky by both wrists and starting to pull. But nobody can come to Steve’s rescue until they’ve pulled Bucky up, and Steve’s grip is already slipping. The hammer isn’t that heavy, but the strap that’s slid down his wrist is still enough to weigh him down. Even this incredibly strong body can’t hold on by its fingertips for long, and if he falls—well, he hasn’t had much time to test his limits, but he seriously doubts he’s going to survive a hundred-foot drop onto a hard-packed dirt floor.

Just when he knows it’s over—when he knows for a fact that his life is about to end—a flash of something fast and metallic spins past Steve. He feels heavy gloves grip him under the arms, and Tony’s voice says in his ear, “I got you, Rogers. Let go.”

Then they’re flying out of the top entrance, just in time; from above, he sees a whole section of the far side of the pyramid shift and start to sink in on itself. Somehow or other, Peggy and Sam have managed to get both Clint and Bucky onto reasonably solid ground; Sam is hauling Bucky, still unconscious down the steps, while Natasha and Peggy each have one of Clint’s arms around their shoulders and are hauling him to safety. Tony hovers in the air as a cloud of dust goes up, and Steve holds his breath and waits for Tony to speak—which he does, almost immediately.

“Rogers,” he says, looking down at the crumbling stone structure, “you and Barnes are fired.”


	15. Avengers, Assemble

It’s not the first time Clint has woken up in a hospital bed with no idea what stupid thing he did that put him there, but it might be the first time he’s felt like his chest wall has been pounded with a sledgehammer, and he knows right away that his life is going to suck for a while. He blinks his eyes open, slowly, and Natasha’s voice says, “Welcome back, Barton.”

“Natasha?” he says. “The hell happened? Hang on,” he says, as it starts to come back to him. “Did Barnes shoot me?”

“Yes. But he’s very sorry now that he’s had a minor cognitive recalibration.”

“Whassat mean?”

“I hit him really hard on the head.” She shrugs. “Call it a hunch. Whether I did it or Rogers did, whatever hold the Tesseract had on him is broken now. He feels terrible, even though it’s obvious that deep down, he didn’t want to hurt you. He’s a good enough shot that if he’d really wanted to kill you, you’d be dead.”

“Well, that’s comforting,” Clint grumbles. “’M’I gonna make it?”

“You’ll be fine. You bled a lot, but the bullet didn’t hit anything vital. Tony flew you to a hospital in Lima and they took the bullet out.”

“Huh,” Clint says. It’s coming back to him now, in bits and pieces. He looks at her. “You slipped your handcuffs,” he says.

“Yes,” she says, with a modest little shrug. “And then I saved your life. Twice. Carter says if I do it one more time, she’ll give me a medal. Imagine that: Natalia Romanova, decorated SSR agent.”

“Well, you certainly know how to play the part,” Clint says. “So if you could’ve got free any time, why’d you play along until we were in the middle of the jungle?”

She does another little shrug, less coy and more embarrassed this time. “I was hoping to build some trust.”

“By lying about being a prisoner? You are one weird lady, Natasha.”

She blinks, then stands. “I should get the doctor,” she says, moving toward the door.

“Natasha?” When she turns back, Clint says, “I like weird ladies.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Is that what passes for sweet talk in America?”

“Nah, it’s just true,” he says. “I do like you, you know. I liked you even before you saved my life.”

“Twice.”

“Yeah. I guess that means I owe you one.”

“So you’re saying I’ve started wiping the red out of my ledger,” Natasha says, returning his smile.

“Well, you had to start somewhere, so it’s nice that you started with the best.”

“The best?” she says, skeptical. “You and your rope tricks are supposed to be the best?”

“It’s a _whip,_ not a rope,” Clint says. “And that’s not the half of what I can do. You think Barnes is a good shot, you oughta see what I can do. Give me a bow and some arrows and the Amazing Trickshot will really blow you away.”

“A bow and arrows?” Natasha repeats skeptically. “Like a caveman?”

“Like Robin Hood,” Clint says, annoyed. “Who was a hero, by the way.”

“I know. I saw the Errol Flynn movie. The Red Room wanted us to keep up with American popular culture.”

“Douglas Fairbanks was better,” Clint says. “Saw it when I was a little kid. Knew right then what I wanted to do with my life.”

“You wanted to grow up to be an archer?”

“Kinda. But I mostly wanted an excuse to steal shit.”

“You know, Clint Barton,” Natasha says, laughing “I think you and I might make a very good team after all.”

 

Bucky doesn’t raise his head when the cell door bangs open. He figures if it isn’t Carter, it’s one of the local police she’s working with, and he knows from experience that nobody’s going to tell him anything until they’ve decided what to charge him with, so there’s no point getting excited about it. That’s what makes it a complete surprise when Steve says, “Buck,” and then crosses the cell in a rush, going down on his knees and wrapping Bucky up in his newly enormous arms.

“Stevie,” Bucky says, so surprised that he doesn’t know what to think. Steve has his face buried in Bucky’s shoulder, and the noise he makes is suspiciously like a sob. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s _wrong?”_ Steve pulls back just far enough to look at him like he’s an idiot. His face is all different now—and it hasn’t escaped Bucky’s notice that his new jawline is a goddamn miracle of nature—but it’s a little disorienting how much he’s still _Steve_ underneath it all. His eyes are the same, and his voice, and the way he brushes back that one lock of blonde hair that always falls down on his forehead, and it will definitely take more than a little divine intervention to change his attitude. “I thought you were lost.”

“I thought you were smaller,” Bucky says, and the little huff he gets in response is also vintage Steve. No matter how bad things got, Bucky always could wring a laugh out of him if he tried hard enough. “What’s going on?”

“I’m getting you out of here. Come on,” he says, tugging on Bucky’s hand—his right hand, obviously; they took the prosthetic before they locked him up. When Bucky doesn’t move, he says, “Bucky. Come on. Let’s go.”

“Does Carter know you’re here?” Bucky asks.

“Of course she does. How do you think I got in? Don’t tell me you thought this was some kind of dramatic prison break or something.”

“It wouldn’t exactly be out of character.”

Steve does the laugh again. “Well, you’re not wrong. If they hadn’t made the right call, I would’ve busted you out, and to hell with them. But Peggy—the real Peggy—is actually pretty sympathetic. I guess you’re not the first person to get tricked and blackmailed by Hydra, and she knows you’re not a danger to anyone anymore, so you’re not gonna be charged with anything. You’re free to go.”

When Bucky still doesn’t move, Steve looks at him for a long moment, then sits down next to him. “You wanna tell me about it?” he asks.

Bucky gives him an anguished look. “Do I really have to say it? I let everybody down, Steve. I thought I was protecting my sister—and you—but I just fucked everything up. I sold out everyone I care about. Tony will never forgive me for turning on him, and that’s _before_ I got brainwashed. I almost killed Clint. And then I tried to kill you.”

“Well, you did a shitty job, considering I’m still alive.”

Steve is trying to use Bucky’s own trick and startle a laugh out of him, and Bucky loves him for it, but he just can’t do it right now. “How is Clint?” he asks.

“Recovering. He said to tell you it wasn’t as bad as Budapest. Were you two really in Budapest?” When Bucky doesn’t answer, Steve says quietly, “You should’ve told me, Buck. About your sister, about Hydra. They could have killed you.”

“What they did might’ve been worse. They made me into someone else, Stevie,” he says, very softly, “and the worst part is, I think I let them. I wanted to forget about… the war. My past. All my mistakes. Losing you and finding you again and then hurting you… I could _do_ it, but living with it is a whole different thing. I think there’s a little part of me that would’ve been just fine with working for Hydra if it meant I didn’t have to remember.”

“You thought you wanted that because you were being controlled,” Steve says, in the professorial tone that Bucky secretly— _very_ secretly—finds just a little bit strident. “We have no idea how the Tesseract works, Buck. The Starks can’t even figure it out. Nobody could’ve fought something that powerful, although for what it’s worth, Natasha says you tried pretty hard. You’re not at fault for this, and you need to put the blame for this where it belongs: on Hydra.”

God, he wishes he could be like Steve sometimes, with everything so black and white. “That’s not all we have to think about,” he argues. “What if some of what the Tesseract put in my head is still in there? What if it’s not safe for me to be running around loose?”

“Then I’ll drag you back to Peggy and she can kick your ass for you. Listen,” Steve says, “you can’t hide in this cell for the rest of your life. For one thing, Becca wants to see you.”

Becca. Shit. All of this happened because he was trying to protect Becca, and he almost forgot to ask about her. “Is she okay? Is the kid—”

“They’re both fine. Hydra agents were holding them hostage in Cusco for more leverage, in case the mind control didn’t work on you. Peggy’s people found her this morning. But Becca wants to make sure _you’re_ okay before they send her home. Come on.” He gives Bucky a wide-eyed, pleading look.

Steve is right, of course. He can’t hide in here forever. Still, there’s about to be a hell of a lot for him to face up to: Clint, who he shot, and Tony and Howard, both of whom he betrayed, and Becca, maybe the worst of all: she was kidnapped just for being related to him, and they threatened her son. She might technically be Becca Parker now, but she’s still a Barnes on the inside, and Barnes women don’t take kindly to threats to their kids. “Can I just have a couple minutes first?”

Steve nods, slowly, and sits down next to Bucky, with his back against the wall. Happily, he’s on Bucky’s right side, and when Bucky reaches for his hand, Steve takes it and twines their fingers together. His hands are bigger now, but somehow, those long artist’s fingers of his are still a perfect fit with Bucky’s. “I,” he says, swallows hard, and goes on, “I still don’t understand what happened to you.”

“Well, first I met Tony Stark,” Steve says.

“Jackass. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do. It was the hammer, Buck. Thor’s hammer did this. Howard is sure there’s some kind of science to it, but I… I have this feeling it was looking for something specific, and I guess I was close enough. Problem was, I wasn’t strong enough to use it in a fight, so it fixed that for me. And here I am.”

“So you look like that because old Mewmew decided you were worthy,” Bucky says. “Obviously, the hammer doesn’t know what a cranky, stubborn bastard you are. Did it hurt?”

“A little.”

“Is it permanent?”

Steve shrugs. “So far. Do you like it?”

Bucky has completely inappropriate feelings about Steve’s new body, given the circumstances, but he shrugs. “I’m not complaining, but it was never your body I was in love with. I just can’t believe the Nazis almost got something that can do that to people because of me. Wait—they _didn’t_ get it, did they?” He doesn’t think so, but everything from the temple is still… fuzzy.

“Nope,” Steve says. “I left it and the Tesseract both with the Starks. They wanted to test the hammer and make sure it’s safe, but it seems to be. There’s a little gamma radiation on it, but Bruce is the expert and he says it’s fine, and Tony and Howard both checked his math.”

“Who’s Bruce?” Bucky asks.

“He was the temple guard. Apparently there was a curse. Anybody who tried to take the hammer out of the temple and failed had to deal with… well, I don’t think anybody really understands that part, either. But once it’s out of the temple, no curse. If you can pick it up, you can keep it.”

“And you picked it up,” Bucky says. “Because you’re a good man.”

“You read the letter from Doctor Blake?”

“Yeah,” Bucky admits. “So I guess this means he was right, and ‘worthy of the hammer of Thor’ is more about the jumping-on-grenades stuff than the master race stuff?”

“Something like that.”

“Huh. So what you do is more important than what’s in your blood. Suck it, Hitler.”

Steve grins. “You think that’s funny, you should’ve heard Tony. ‘Let me get this straight: you’re telling me that good won the day because evil didn’t bother to get its work peer-reviewed?’ If they did think it had to do with your body, though, then I still don’t understand why they thought you qualified. I mean, I think you’re spectacular, but you’re still human.” When Bucky is silent just a little too long, he says, in a tone that’s obviously intended to sound lighter than it does, “You _are_ human, aren’t you?”

“Uh,” Bucky says. “I think so. Mostly. It’s... kind of a long story.”

“Well, I got nowhere to be.”

Bucky looks at Steve, and Steve looks at Bucky, and Bucky is suddenly struck by the utter futility of argument. Steve has always been the one with the convictions, and while Bucky doesn’t always like his judgment calls, pretty much _every_ major fuckup of Bucky’s life started with a decision he knew Steve wouldn’t like. If Steve has decided to believe that Bucky is a good person in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, then he might as well just resign himself to it and do his damnedest to live up to that belief from here on out.

And maybe it _is_ true that what happened to him doesn’t have to define him. Maybe the first step toward leaving his past behind is to stop hiding it, any of it. “Okay,” he says, taking a deep breath. “I’m just warning you, it’s gonna sound pretty weird.”

“Wow, and the whole trip up to now was so _normal.”_

“Punk,” Bucky mutters. “Just… promise you’re not gonna run away screaming, okay? Because after everything that’s happened, I kind of feel like I could handle anything but that.”

“Indiana Barnes,” Steve says, shifting his new muscles so that Bucky nestles a little closer to him, “I’m never planning to let you out of my sight again.”

 

“So, Banner,” Tony says, “what are you gonna do now?”

Bruce is sitting in the quin-jet in borrowed pajamas and bare feet, a look that makes him seem oddly childlike, despite the gray in his hair. He seems startled when Tony addresses him. “I don’t know. Can’t exactly go back to my old life after disappearing for twenty years. Especially not with…” He makes a gesture that encompasses, basically, the world, but Tony suspects it means the thing he calls _the other guy._

The scientist in Tony is dying to analyze that _other guy,_ but the rest of him just wants to make Bruce eat a sandwich and take a nap. It’s really annoying having a heart, sometimes. “Well,” he says, “I’m not saying you have to come back to New York with us. But Dad does have this one energy-research lab that could really use a supervisor.”

“That’s kind of you, Tony, but… the other guy is still in here, you know. I don’t know what might bring him out again. If he got loose in a city full of people…”

“Listen, we don’t have to figure out all the details right now,” Tony says. “You’ve had a hell of a… two decades. Come with us now, and we’ll figure it out. We have time.”

“Okay,” Bruce says, still looking a little baffled. “Thanks, Tony.”

“Well, we did destroy your previous residence, so it’s not like we don’t owe you.” Tony walks past Bruce, patting him on the shoulder as he does, and climbs through the hatch of the quin-jet and down the ladder.

Howard is tightening a bolt on one of the engines, humming to himself as he works. Tony has always hated it when people compare him to his father, but he can’t deny that they’re alike in one way: both of them are always happiest with a wrench in hand. He wants to just keep walking, but Howard spots him slinking past and calls, “You need better engine mounts on this thing. You take one good blast from anti-aircraft fire, and the whole engine could go.”

“That’s why there are four more engines, Dad,” Tony says, rolling his eyes.

He’s going to keep walking—nobody makes an exit like Tony Stark—but Howard says, “Tony.”

Tony turns back. “Yeah?” he says shortly.

“You said if you were running Stark Industries, you’d be using it to change the world. Did you mean that?”

“Yeah, I _meant_ it, Dad. Look at what I’ve done already, okay? The arc reactors, the gravidic reversion pack, the repulsor rays—nobody else on the planet could’ve come up with those things. I know you think I’m arrogant, but that’s the truth. And it’s time for me to be doing things like that, not redesigning a bomb for the eighteenth time. Anybody can blow things up, but I can _build_ them.”

“You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to hear you say that,” Howard says.

Tony, who’s been working up a good head of steam, stops abruptly. “What?”

“You think I built Stark Industries for myself,” Howard says. “You think I’ve kept you out of the day-to-day operations because I don’t trust you. That’s not it at all, Tony. You remember what I told you when the Germans marched into Poland?”

“Hard to forget, Dad. You said war is bad for people, but it’s great for business.”

“And you know how I knew that?”

“Because you fought in the Great War, Dad, with your buddy Max Eisenhardt, I only heard that story literally every day growing up—”

“And no matter how many times I told it, you never understood what I was trying to tell you. My hands were already dirty, Tony. Yours were supposed to be clean.” He lets that sink in for a minute, then goes on: “Do you know what your grandfather said to me, when you were born? He said, ‘I didn’t leave my home and come to the United States so my son could be an engineer. I came so his son could be an artist.’ You’re an artist, Tony. Someday this war’s going to be over, and you’ll be the one who gives us a fresh start. Gets us out of building weapons and into building things like that arm you made for Barnes. Hell, kiddo, with your brains and a clean reputation, you could build the rocket ship that puts a man on the moon, and I can’t wait to turn you loose and watch you leave your old man in the dust.”

Tony blinks. “You could’ve fooled me. I thought you planned to let me have Stark Industries over your dead body. Literally. I was pretty sure I’d have to step over your corpse to get into the boardroom.”

“Kid, I don’t know how anybody can be as smart and as stupid as you at the same time. ...What are you doing?”

“Hugging you,” Tony says. “It’s too much, right?”

“It’s a little much.”

“Yep, tried it, didn’t work, don’t have to try it again. Stick to firm handshakes from here on out?”

“Tell you what, son,” Howard says, “why don’t we start by taking another look at that arc reactor? While I was in Morocco, I picked up a few pounds of something called vibranium on the black market. I think it’s going to be just the ticket for stabilizing the power core. And once we get that taken care of, I’m going to watch you _really_ learn how to fly.”

 

Brock Rumlow is not having a good day. It’s not just that he barely got out of the crumbling Inca temple with his life, or that he’s alone in the jungle at least three days’ hike from civilization, or even that he had Barnes completely under his control and lost him, although the Red Skull is notoriously unforgiving of failure. Rumlow is a practical man. He doesn’t like being beaten, but he’s no true believer in Hydra and he’s not about to get killed as an example. He’s got a contingency plan, which is why he’s got a stash of Hydra money and weapons in a safehouse in Lima; all he has to do is walk out of this jungle and pick it up, and then he can disappear and start over. He hears Argentina is nice this time of year.

No, what’s bugging him, and what will probably keep bugging him for the rest of his life, is that he couldn’t lift that hammer.

He’s heard all Schmidt’s pet theories, which range from the almost reasonable (like the idea that Barnes could do it because he had Zola’s formula) to the ridiculous (that it takes an inhuman, which means a person whose ancestors got friendly with aliens or something). The thing is, when he picked up the hammer, he… felt something. And he’s not a fanciful guy. Never been religious, never had much use for philosophy—Rumlow realized early on in his life that one day the big dark was gonna get him, and he wanted to get everything he could get out of life before that day came. That’s what Hydra’s about to him: power. Until now, he thought he knew what that meant. But that hammer… He _wanted_ it. And it just sat there when he tried to pick it up, not just heavy but motionless, like he was trying to move a mountain.

What the hell did that scrawny blonde runt have that he didn’t?

Rumlow is so caught up in his own thoughts that he belatedly realizes he’s been ignoring a rustle in the foliage behind him. He turns, half-drawing a pistol, just in time to see a flash of color—some animal ducking back into the underbrush. He watches, then shrugs and dismisses it, shoving the pistol back into its holster. Out of the corner of his eye, it looked like some kind of big tropical bird with brightly colored feathers: curious, probably, but harmless. Maybe the damn thing is even useful, in a way: no bird would be lurking around on the jungle floor if there were any really dangerous animals around, like jaguars or crocodiles or whatever lives here. He keeps walking, ignoring it.

That works up till the moment when the dinosaur springs out of the bushes at him, baring its teeth.

Trying to figure out the hammer’s trick was always going to drive him crazy for the rest of his life. It just happens that the rest of his life isn’t very long.

 

“It’s a trick,” Clint says, with a carnie’s certainty, looking at the hammer in the middle of the table, where Tony made Steve put it as soon as the dishes were cleared away.

Bucky squeezes Steve’s hand under the dinner table, and Steve turns and grins at him. A month after the temple fell in, this is the first time everybody has been together, here in the Starks’ Riverside Drive mansion. Things are still tense in places—Bucky has a lot of trust to repair, and Natasha has to build it from the ground up—but Tony is at least trying to extend a few olive branches of his own, as evidenced by this dinner. Howard is out of town on business, but most of the others are here: Clint, fresh out of the New York hospital Tony had him flown to, is next to Natasha, who’s been fussing at him all night to eat more and build up his strength so he can get back to fieldwork; Pepper and Sam have spent the evening finding common ground in a lengthy assessment of Tony’s most reckless acts of stupidity (Pepper’s list is longer but Sam’s is arguably more impressive); the Maximoff twins, just arrived by boat from Morocco, both look uncertain but, at least in Wanda’s case, hopeful; and Bruce has been keeping quiet at his end of the table, until the subject of the hammer comes up.

“It’s not a trick,” he says now, and although his voice is mild, everyone else falls silent. “I should know. I’m sorry, Tony, but it’s Occam’s razor. For now, ‘magic’ is the best explanation we have.”

“There _is_ an explanation, though,” Tony says, picking up the threads of a long-running argument. “We just don’t have the tools to find it yet.”

“What do you think, Wanda?” Natasha asks.

“I don’t even know how I do what I do,” Wanda says, with a modest little shrug. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“It’s not about guessing,” Tony says, clearly frustrated. “I’m a scientist. I should _know._ What’s so special about you, Rogers?”

“Nothing,” Steve says, and means it. Honestly, it was a little embarrassing when the SSR brought in agent after agent, scientist after scientist, and none of them could lift the hammer. It looks like Mjolnir is his until he dies or figures out how to pass it on. Until then, he’s not inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth. “I’m just a kid from Brooklyn.”

“Viking blood,” Tony says, snapping his fingers. “You told me your mother said you had Norse ancestors. It’s something about the bloodline. I can’t shake the feeling that Oswald Avery’s onto something with his nucleic acid theory. Bruce! That’s your first project. Get ahold of Avery and MacLeod’s research and see if you can crack the DNA problem.”

“You want me to open up a whole new field of genetic study just to prove a point?” says Bruce.

“When have you known me to do anything for any other reason than to prove a point?”

“I certainly haven’t seen evidence of it yet,” says a new voice in the doorway, and all of them turn to find Peggy Carter, fashionably late and spectacularly out of uniform in an elegant red dress. (Bucky makes a low, impressed noise, and Steve halfheartedly kicks him under the table.) “This is quite the spread, Mr. Stark,” she says, looking over the remains of the dinner. “I hope this indicates that you’ve got a cook who’s a genius at stretching provisions, and not an abuser of ration stamps.”

“Actually, it’s the butler who’s the genius about these things,” Tony says. “Join us, Agent. I was just about to tell everybody about your proposal.”

“So you did have an ulterior motive for getting us all here tonight,” Steve says, unsurprised.

“You can blame me for that, Rogers,” Peggy says, handing him a stack of folders. “Take one and pass the rest around, please. There’s one for everyone here.” She gives them all a dazzling smile and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to talk to you about a little something we’re calling the Avengers initiative.”


	16. Epilogue: Mjolnir, Part II

“How many?” Bucky asks, when Steve comes in.

“All of them.” Steve carefully sets Mjolnir on the floor and slides in next to Bucky on the sofa. These rooms were Bucky’s, first: Tony assigned him and Clint each to a guest suite when they started working for him, claiming he wanted them nearby in case of late-night errands, but Bucky and Clint both understood that Tony was desperately lonely, rattling around this huge house alone. That won’t be a problem anymore. The twins insist they’re only here temporarily, but Steve essentially moved in with Bucky the day they got back to New York, and Natasha, Sam, and Bruce have all taken him up on his offer to let them room here—when they’re between missions, at least.

“What did I tell you?” Bucky says, slinging his arm around Steve without looking up from his book. “They’re all idiots.”

Steve shakes his head. “So what about you?” he asks. “You ready to follow the Iron Man into the jaws of death?”

Bucky laughs, shifting his weight so he can lay his head on Steve’s shoulder. “Hell no,” he says. Sure, Tony’s the team leader in name, even if the name is a truly ludicrous one that Carter’s people made up for the PR, but he’s not in this for Tony. “That little guy from Brooklyn, the one that was too dumb to run away from a fight—I’m following him.” He pauses a moment before adding, “But you’re keeping the hammer, right?”

“I don’t think I have a choice,” Steve says. “Honestly, I’m still kind of hoping I can get Tony to make me another shield. But Peggy says if we’re gonna be a unit, we gotta have a symbol, and Mjolnir’s a pretty damn impressive one, so…”

“Think you’ll be able to call down lightning eventually?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says. “But I think it can make a decent dent in Hydra.” He looks hard at Bucky. “Hey. Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Pretty sure,” Bucky says thoughtfully. “I’m not re-enlisting. Fuck that—I’ve done my Army time. And I meant it when I said I don’t want to kill people anymore. But if the SSR wants to hire a ragtag band of scrappy mercenaries to steal priceless artifacts out from under Hydra’s noses, I’m definitely in.”

“You make it sound like the plot of a pulp novel,” Steve says. “Why are you really doing it, Buck? And don’t say it’s because someone has to keep an eye on me. Peggy might actually kill you if you keep saying that.”

“I’m gonna get her to tell me how she got that eyepatch,” Bucky declares. “I’ll use my charm and my wit until she has to tell me everything.”

“You’re doomed,” Steve says, laughing. “C’mon, Buck. Tell me why you’re really agreeing to this.”

“Jeez. I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do, Steve. I notice nobody’s bothering to ask _you_ if you’re sure you wanna be part of the Avengification Squad, or whatever the hell we’re calling ourselves these days.”

“It’s gonna be hard, you know. And dangerous.”

“I know,” Bucky says. “But you and me together oughta be able to handle anything.”

“Absolutely,” Steve says. Then he yawns. “You coming to bed?”

“You go on. I’m gonna finish this chapter. Aaagh, don’t give me the disappointed look. Gimme two minutes to find out if Francie gets to go to high school or not, and then I’ll belong to you and those big muscles of yours for the rest of the night.”

“Fine.” Steve gets up, then leans down and kisses Bucky full on the mouth. “Just so you know what you’re missing.”

“Yeah, ‘worthy’ my ass,” Bucky pretends to grumble. “How somebody with as much of a dirty mind as you’ve got can be the chosen thunder-whatever is beyond me. Two minutes. I’ll be right in.”

Steve heads into the bedroom, and Bucky pretends to read for another thirty seconds or so, until he’s sure Steve is really gone. Then he stands up, stretching, and looks down at the hammer.

He wouldn’t do this in front of everybody. But alone… well.

Bucky wraps both of his hands, clockwork and flesh, around Mjolnir’s leather-wrapped handle, and pulls.

It doesn’t move. He wasn’t really expecting it to. Hell, he’s known he wasn’t worthy since he heard the words ‘good man,’ no matter what the brainwashed version of himself might’ve thought. But—well, he was curious. Doesn’t everybody sort of secretly figure that if they’d been in the right place at the right time, they might’ve been the one to pull the sword out of the stone? Obviously it wasn’t gonna choose a criminal whose only redeeming quality is loving another man enough to be all kinds of stupid about it, but he had to know, all the same. He lets out a silent little laugh and gives it one more tug, just to really drive the point home.

Which is when it shifts.

Just a little.

Startled, Bucky springs back so fast that he almost topples over. He catches himself on the arm of the sofa and gives the hammer a good glare, as if it did that on purpose. Of course it didn’t, because it’s a _hammer,_ and now he feels even dumber about the whole thing, but…

It moved.

It _moved._

“Buck?” Steve calls, from the bedroom. “You okay out there?”

“Yeah. Fuckin’ tripped over your fuckin’ hammer,” Bucky lies through his teeth. “For the love of Mike, you gotta be more careful where you leave this thing, I almost broke my goddamn foot.”

“Sorry,” Steve says, coming to the doorway. “You okay?”

“Nope,” Bucky tells him. “Can’t walk. You’re gonna have to carry me.”

“Jerk,” Steve says, laughing.

“Punk.” Bucky resolves then and there to find out if Steve and his fancy new body actually _can_ carry him, somehow or other. He glances back at Mjolnir, but it’s just sitting there, looking like a perfectly innocent inanimate object. Bucky shakes his head, leaves the mystery for another day, and follows Steve into the bedroom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's [the Tumblr post for this fic,](https://follow-the-sun-fanfic.tumblr.com/post/164464851505/indiana-barnes-and-the-curse-of-the-tesseract-a) and once again, [here's Sula's gorgeous art](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11873487), which I'm still freaking out over.
> 
> And yes... I have no idea when it'll be, but I do eventually hope to write more in this series! ^_^
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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